Using the Agile Planning Onion with a Now-Next-Later Roadmap

Fleur Sykes

May 2, 2023 11 minute read

As we all learned in Shrek, onions are a lot like ogres. They both have layers, and they both make people cry. The similarities stop, however, when it comes to agile planning; ogres are famously terrible at strategizing.

Luckily, you’re not an ogre. If you’re here, you’re much more likely to be a product manager – more specifically, a product manager who wants to figure out how to toe the difficult line between agile, ever-adapting workflow, and maintaining a long-term product vision.

And that’s where onions come in. Learn its ins and outs, and the agile planning onion could be just the solution you’re looking for: and your new best friend when it comes to getting stuff done in the here and now, without losing sight of the bigger picture.

Here’s what we’ll be covering in this piece:

What is agile planning?
What is the agile planning onion?
What are the agile planning onion layers?
How the agile planning onion supports a now-next-later roadmap
Useful next steps

What is agile planning?

Agile planning is, as the name suggests, more lithe and ready to pivot than traditional planning methods. Whereas traditional planning will see senior teams block out a fixed plan for a year or a quarter and doggedly stick to it until the end, agile planning deals in much shorter bursts that serve an immediate need – and with a more egalitarian approach across the company.

In the agile planning world, these bursts are usually known as sprints, and agile teams will work through a number of sprints of different lengths throughout the year – each one of which will ladder up through various stages to an overarching vision.

The big, juicy benefit of this approach is that it means you’re suddenly able to adapt to customer and business needs as and when they occur.

Traditional planning methods that block out projects for up to a year at a time are slow and creaky. By the time all’s said and done, the market may have moved or technology may have shifted so dramatically that it’s too late to turn the ship away from disaster.

That kind of planning is fine when you’re making something static that’s unaffected by shifting markets. If you’re building a skyscraper, for example, you’d probably want to plan every part out first and then get to work. But the world of software is different, requiring that project managers constantly have their ear to the ground – and an ability to make sharp turns when needed.

A competitor just released a game-changing feature? Agile teams can put the brakes on what they were working on and shift focus in a heartbeat. Comparatively, the act of unpicking projects and resources planned out with traditional methods is a complete nightmare.

Agile product management means…

1. Faster time to market

Quick delivery through regular product updates and feature launches thanks to working in sprints. This reduces time to market and keeps you ahead of the competition.

2. Flexibility

Agile allows teams to adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs, keeping your product relevant and valuable.

3. Customer focus

With your customer needs at the center of the development process, you’ll ensure you’re solving actual needs and wants.

4. Collaboration

Teamwork and transparency are at the heart of Agile. And that teamwork often results in better communication and more streamlined problem-solving.

4. Continuous discovery

Iteration and continuous discovery are key. They let you highlight issues as they’re flagged and improve the product on a regular basis.

Agile planning, then, ensures that every project you undertake is timely and necessary in the moment – all without losing sight of your overall vision. The focus here is on small, frequent project deliveries that work together to form something larger than the sum of their parts.

What is the agile planning onion?

The agile planning onion is a visual representation of the concentric layers of agile planning, ranging from the day-to-day to the long-term vision. In other words: each onion layer is a level at which you can apply an agile planning framework.

That’s important because it’s easy to think that you can only be ‘agile’ with more day-to-day stuff. In actuality, it’s best to think in agile terms at every level, because that’s how you adapt to customer needs and solve problems as they arise.

The onion diagram represents both time and effort, with the smallest value at the bottom, and the biggest at the top:

Time

At the bottom of the onion, you have more frequent projects, sprints, and iterations. As you work your way toward the top, things slow down, but it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that you can fall back into traditional planning techniques here. Infrequent doesn’t mean ‘yearly’ or ‘never’.

Effort

Likewise, as you climb up through the layers, you’ll find that projects and sprints require more and more effort. Short sprints to fix bugs or deploy patches, for instance, require much less effort than overhauling an entire product vision or strategy.

What are the agile planning onion layers?

There are five agile planning layers:

Vision: The overarching goal or mission for your product.
Strategy (or Roadmap): The high-level approach or plan, and sequence of major milestones
Release: The plan for delivering a specific set of features or functionality
Sprint: The plan for the current iteration, including specific tasks and deliverables
Day/Business as usual (BAU): The day-to-day stuff, including things to get done, progress updates, and challenges.

Shield your eyes; it’s time to break open that onion and explore each layer in a bit more detail.

1. Vision

Defining your product’s vision is an exercise in deciding what you want it to do for people, how it differs from others on the market, and what your dream is for it. This is topline stuff, which shouldn’t be taken lightly; your product vision will inform everything that happens further down the onion.

Vision can (and should) change from time to time depending on trends in the market and where your product currently sits on the product lifecycle, but generally, this is a more abstract, long-lasting part of the onion. We’ve got an article here with some example product vision statements from brands that have become household names.

2. Strategy (or Roadmap)

The strategy layer is all about taking that vision and turning it into something attainable. If your goal for your product is for it to be the world’s most useful communication tool, for example, you’ll need to map out some strategies for achieving that goal – including figuring out priorities and an order in which to tackle things.

In other words: the roadmapping stage requires that you can plot a path between your lofty aims and actual work. You’ll want to group features, updates, and projects into releases, remembering not to get too far into the nitty-gritty of daily work – that comes further down the onion.

3. Release

Here you can get a bit more specific about what each release is going to entail, and what it’ll mean for both the product and the user. Projects ladder up to releases that can be moved around depending on priority, and each release should tick a strategy box that helps your product edge closer to the vision you have for it. You don’t need to get caught up with specific deadlines – getting releases mapped out sensibly and regularly should be enough to ensure that everyone can deliver things on time, without going over capacity.

4. Sprint

Releases are essentially a compilation of completed projects (called ‘stories’ in the Agile world), that are usually planned out every couple of weeks, and carried out as sprints. These one or two-week sprints are the foundational blocks of your project’s ongoing evolution. By breaking things down into these short sprints, you’ll ensure that you can pivot if circumstances change.

5. Day/Business as usual (BAU)

Being agile really means being capable of changing your plans quickly. That’s why most agile teams have a daily morning ‘standup’ – an all-hands meeting or call in which everyone updates on their progress, flags any blockers, and adjusts the plan for the day ahead accordingly.

These daily planning sessions inform the nature of each sprint, which bundle up toward releases, which are planned out on your roadmap, which help fulfill your vision. Now that’s a tasty onion.

How the agile planning onion supports a Now-Next-Later roadmap

Roadmapping is a massive part of the agile planning onion – it’s got a whole layer dedicated to it. But roadmaps are tricky to get right.

When you’re bundling features up into various releases and you need to communicate when specific ones are going to land, it can be tempting to get bogged down with exact deadlines. But deadlines aren’t agile, and they’re a nightmare to unpick if things slip or the market changes on you.

Here are four reasons why truly agile teams think in terms of Now-Next-Later when it comes to roadmapping their product’s future:

1. It’s not about specific deadlines

Deadlines can be paralyzing. The more stock you put in a specific date that’s been plucked out of thin air, the harder it is to be truly agile – you can’t pivot to focus on emerging, customer-centric needs if your whole roadmap is built around some far-flung date.

2. It helps you stay nimble

Say you’re working towards a release that adds a specific new feature, but you learn that a lot of customers are experiencing bugs with an existing one. Or maybe a competitor launches something completely different, and you realize that that’s where the customer need is. A Now-Next-Later roadmap makes it ridiculously easy to park things in the Later column and add things to the Now one – or to swap priorities in a hot minute.

3. It’s customer-centric

Traditional planning makes a lot of assumptions. It takes a snapshot of the market environment and plans things out for years at a time, as though nothing will change. But customer needs do change, a lot, which is why agile planning is great from a customer experience point of view.

Planning on a Now-Next-Later roadmap lets you make rapid changes based on customer needs – and the best roadmapping tools know how to make customer feedback useful. ProdPad, for example, has a customer feedback portal baked right in, which lets you focus on the things people actually want.

4. It’s egalitarian

Agile planning is bottom-up and top-down. The vision proliferates down from the top, and the daily planning informs releases and roadmaps. That makes it a pretty egalitarian framework, where everyone needs to be involved for quick decisions to happen. So it makes sense that any roadmapping software you use can adhere to that transparent, communal ethos.

When you get teams in daily standups letting you know that something isn’t working, or that a previous priority now shouldn’t be, that’s an insight that can make or break a sprint, a release, and a whole product’s future. We’ve already said that a Now-Next-Later roadmap makes swapping and changing priorities so much easier than any deadline-based Gantt chart ever could. But beyond that, it’s super simple: planning under those three pillars is a methodology that everyone involved – from developers to investors – can easily understand.

Useful next steps – After the agile planning onion

Hopefully, that’s a good quickfire course on how you can use agile planning to flesh out a roadmap that keeps the whole team happy, productive, and solving customer needs. But if you’ve got an enquiring mind, we know you might want to know what happens next. So here’s a handful of links that might help you take this theory and turn it into practice…

Using the Agile Planning Onion with a Now-Next-Later Roadmap

Here’s what we’ll be covering in this piece:

What is agile planning?