Product Plans

• Evergreen Product Roadmap

Goal

Our product planning and execution strategy is designed to align with the company's strategic objectives, marketing goals, and feedback from our customers. Planning is continuous with quarterly check-ins.

It’s the EPD teams – product, engineering, and design together – that have the expertise, context and pride of ownership to be best suited to propose the highest impact work that fits those goals. And they’re the team that can do the correct eng scoping.

Planning Process

Planning is continuous, guided by the company's strategic objectives, product strategy, marketing goals, feedback from our customers, especially GTM-tracked product gaps, and internal needs (e.g., scalability, reliability, performance, security). Product owns prioritization and utilizes input from other stakeholders to ensure none of these categories are neglected.

Work items from these input sources are divided into three categories:

• Work In Progress (WIP): Already started. WIP has specified target dates, based on the work's scope and requirements.
  • By default, WIP should not be interrupted.
  • As a rule of thumb, the number of WIP projects should be no more than $TEAM_SIZE/2 to avoid singleton projects. Singleton projects lead to slower execution, less knowledge sharing (single point of failure), and less peer-to-peer learning.
• Next queue: A short (max 5) ordered list of planned work without target dates. This work should represent the team’s most important upcoming work, across all categories.
  • This can be reordered or added to (up to the limit) without notification of stakeholders but no approval needed. Removing items requires approval from stakeholders for that item, Head of Product, and Head of Eng.
• Backlog: An unordered set of work with no associated target or commitment dates.

New work items are triaged into one of these three categories (see the FAQ for details).

Types of projects

• Targeted projects: Set only for—and for all—Work In Progress. Gives stakeholders a rough idea of when the work might be delivered.
  • The team can change the scope and date of a target at will. This gives the team flexibility to adjust based on trade-offs between date and scope. Changes should be based on good reasons and should be broadly announced to stakeholders.
• Commitments: Set for work with external-to-EPD commitments. Work can be committed without yet being started.
  • A commitment means EPD will deliver a high-quality feature as agreed upon by a certain date, and will follow through at the expense (if needed) of non-committed projects. It could be deal-specific or customer-specific if it’s defined as such. Any change to scope or timing requires stakeholder approval.ch

FAQ

Q: How do we prioritize work without the planning process?

A: When prioritizing work (new or backlogged), the team should go through the following process:

• Does this work have an external commitment date? When does the work need to be started to meet that commitment date?
  • Changing a commitment date or the scope of a commitment requires buy in from the relevant stakeholders.
• Should this work interrupt Work In Progress?
  • Default answer is no! Interrupting Work In Progress should occur only for unavoidably urgent work like an incident or a commitment with a date outside of our control.