In today's disruptive business landscape, traditional product roadmaps struggle to keep pace with rapid change.
Rigid plans cascade, leaving teams scrambling to adjust visions and priorities. Adopting an Enterprise Agility Way of Thinking (EAWT) can empower product leaders to navigate uncertainty. By integrating key principles into roadmap strategy, you create focus while retaining flexibility.
What is Enterprise Agility?
Enterprise Agility is a holistic approach to drive adaptation, innovation and sustainability in volatile markets. It provides models to sense change and frameworks to respond. We call it ecosystem instead of framework and you will see why. Core principles include:
- Focusing on Organizational health
- Embracing Mental agility and the 4 types of resilience
- Encouraging collaboration and intellectual humility
- Investing in workforce capability and wellbeing (TriValue Company Model)
- Sensing signals through tools like Future Thinking
- Establishing feedback loops and learning systems
Traditional roadmaps tend to extrapolate the future from past trends. But exponential change renders these forecasts obsolete. Enterprise Agility gives product leaders tools and an ecosystem to continuously evaluate markets and recalibrate direction.
The Bifocal Approach for Balanced Roadmaps
The Bifocal Approach is a key Enterprise Agility method for balancing short-term execution with long-term vision. The Bifocal Approach operates across two time horizons:
- 0 to 12 months focused on Spot Indicators: These represent existing metrics, key performance indicators and objectives to optimize, incrementally innovate and improve within current capabilities. Spot Indicators create emphasis on addressing urgent needs and continuing progress based on present realities.
- 12 to 36 months focused on Futures (indicators): These explore signals, scenarios and opportunities that may emerge as contexts, ecosystems and user needs evolve. Futures indicators look beyond the trends of today to investigate strategic questions, choices and partnerships that could become relevant.
For product roadmaps, the Bifocal Approach involves:
- Leveraging Spot Indicators to deliver on current priorities and promises to customers
- Using Future Thinking to scan for threats and possibilities on the horizon
- Planning iterative experiments to validate assumptions and hypotheses
- Incorporating triggers and pivot points to re-evaluate direction
- Balancing short-term execution with long-term opportunity exploration
This bifocal perspective provides the stability to optimize today's business while creating readiness to adapt as conditions change. Resources focus where most critical in the present, while looking ahead to what may unfold. Learn more about Future Thinking and TVC on Enterprise Agility Fundatemtanls Chapters 8 and 9.