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Status Shipped
Categories Strategy
Created by Guest
Created on Oct 13, 2015

On our way to Initiative Roadmap Nirvana - Priority 3 of 3 - Ability to see the size of an initiative in story points or time

First, we LOVE the new Strategy / Roadmap option.

Our company maps features to epics, and requirements to user stories, so initiatives are exactly the level of detail we want to use to communicate with our executives, and also to communicate to the company as a whole.  And the gantt chart format is also exactly what we're looking for.

Our plan is to use the initiative road map to communicate with executives, and get buy-in on priorities - and shift priorities as needed.

To this end, we are asking for three new capabilities (in order of our priorities):

1.  New Ordering Options (https://big.ideas.aha.io/ideas/APP-I-1764)
2.  The ability to drop a pin, and add text to the roadmap (https://big.ideas.aha.io/ideas/APP-I-1765)
3.  The ability to visually see the size (in story points or time) of each initiative on the roadmap

I'm creating 3 ideas; this is the third of three.

 

Ability to see the size of an initiative in story points or time

WHY IS IT USEFUL

As we are communicating roadmap initiatives to executives, it's helpful to see the relative size of initiatives; the timeline doesn't accurately reflect that because we don't see how many teams are working on the it.

The size of the initiative is helpful in discussions about priorities.  Often times executives want to push initiatives up in the timeline, and an initiative size would improve the discussion - if we move a 100 story point initiative up in the timeline, is there a similarly sized initiative we can move out?  

While the decision to shift priorities is never that cut and dried, an initiative size would add value and context to the discussion.

 

Who Would Benefit

Product Managers, Executives, Sales

 

HOW WOULD IT WORK

 

We see it working similar to the way we size features.

  1. Add the ability to size initiatives (in story points or time)
  2. Add the ability to switch between initiative sizing and a sum of all the features within an initiative.
    (similar to the way it works on features - we can have a size set at the feature level, or we can 'set requirements estimates', and rollup all the story points of the associated requirements)

The first item (ability to size the initiatives themselves)  is the most important - since we're generally dealing with an initiative roadmap two or three or four quarters in the future, we may only have feature sizes for the initiatives that will complete in the next quarter or so.

I'm hesitating about even adding the second item, since it's really the first that's critical, but it would be cool to rollup the feature sizes into an initiative.... :)

 

 

  • ADMIN RESPONSE
    Apr 29, 2020

    Thank you for sharing this idea! We are excited to share that Enterprise+ customers can now set team-based estimates and visualize each team’s workload on the capacity report. This includes the ability for your initiatives to roll-up estimates from features or master features.

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  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Nov 14, 2019

    I also think something Aha's roadmaps are missing is the "sizing" of initiatives. Being able to see the relative size of two initiatives next to each other would greatly improve the ability for the non-engineers to participate in the prioritization discussion.

  • Avigail Ehrenhaus
    Reply
    |
    Aug 3, 2017

    We have similar needs.  It's hugely important to us to be able to size initiatives.  When presenting to executives, we discuss capacity and planning at the initiative level.  Currently we need to do this in excel.

1 MERGED

Enable estimates field for initiatives

Merged
We're working out our roadmap for the next few quarters and getting high level estimates for initiative level items is a must to help our customers prioritize their big asks. This can be done with features and requirements, but not initiatives; th...
Yen Pham almost 5 years ago in Roadmaps 0 Shipped