I’ve been saying this in a number of comments recently, so thought I’d sling a new topic and see if others agree and will vote for it.
I know that Monzo had a visible Product Roadmap (in Trello?) in the past, but I don’t think we need that level of visibility, a simple infographic/list that shows which features are being built:
Now
Next
Later
And yes, I think Next could also be called “Soon ”
Publish this on a regular basis (quarterly/monthly) and just make sure that the only things that disappear are the ones that have been built (they can circle back into this list if you are enhancing them) because we all know that someone will spot if a feature suddenly disappears from the lists without being announced.
I know from personal experience this is not an easy task, as many times one ‘feature’ will overlap several pieces of work, but looking at how Monzo communicates out to us you do tend to talk in feature terminology, even if it’s “new design”, so I think it is feasible to add this to your communication channels.
I agree, they should publish some high level ‘here is where we are going short term’ plan. Even if they re-purpose the neglected “Making Monzo” section of the app and make it useful and interesting again rather than a list of old projects that haven’t had any update in months.
It doesn’t have to be Trello, even just a simple list with a goal and time frame would suffice. I think Freetrade currently does a better job of communication on future product plans.
Publish this on a regular basis (quarterly/monthly) and just make sure that the only things that disappear are the ones that have been built (they can circle back into this list if you are enhancing them) because we all know that someone will spot if a feature suddenly disappears from the lists without being announced.
@gmclean Voted & Agree with this and the post in general with one word of caution. It should be in a format that the general user can easily understand. I’m an Agile Product Manager by trade and produce one for my organisation, we keep it simple in Excel with lots of colours and no jargon.
There’s a more technical one for those inclined, with sprints, story points etc, etc…
Yeah, simple is better for this I think. I don’t care which sprint a team is on, or which story points they’ve tested, just that something is being built, or not, and if not, is it ‘next/soon’ or just ‘sometime in the future’.
You’re right, we haven’t been keeping the roadmap updated since we moved away from the old Trello roadmap.
Right now we’re discussing who should look after updating this (is it the product teams themselves, or the community team?) and whether we should re-think it. So thanks for letting us know you find it useful!
I’m trying not to get too specific, this has to work for Monzo and be easy to keep up to date. I agree Trello would be the obvious solution but ANYTHING that is reference-able and up to date is all I’m looking for.
Well I can only speak for my own viewpoint as a dev/pm myself and what id like to see as a user
A week can be both a long/short time in development. As long as updates happen on a regular basis (potentially weekly) here I wouldnt care too much as long as i could see some sort of progress happening across the board and i felt “involved” again like back in the good ol’ days.
I think the problem is right now that each team now is trying to do their own weekly updates (like plus) so when they have a slow week they feel like they need to put in some filler or justify it.
If this was a standardised update across all teams and released at once there would be less tendency to do this i think?
But my main counterpoint is that if a lot of the details were redacted, which they would most likely need to be, then it might not be super interesting to share externally?
Like, to tell you that we discussed the latest updates on Business Banking (for example) isn’t super interesting unless there are details that we can share externally, and typically the flow is that something gets shared internally and then, if it’s progressing well, we’ll make a separate update publicly not long after that.
We also hold external updates to a different standard - internally there’s an unspoken understanding that things are always subject to change, whereas mentioning things publicly holds more a weight of committal, if that makes sense?
With that being said I do think it’s worth discussing!
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