The Challenges

When setting up such a modern product organization, a couple of transformational challenges are being faced.

Usually internal systems (e.g. orgcharts) do not deal well with a multi-dimensional organization; so the new structures are visualized with traditional office tools (e.g. presentation slides or spreadsheets), quickly creating the usual problem of multiple versions, fuzzy data models and unconnectedness (the different dimensions are not related to each other).

As soon as a couple of product teams are launched, the challenge of the roadmap management approaches; traditional tools which are good for structured ticketing in the individual product teams (e.g. Atlassian Jira) have added roadmap planning as an afterthought and are way too complex to setup for an organization which just started to learn this new way of working.

Often different teams started to self-organize differently and bringing together all of this in a roadmap planning places unnecessary constraints on the way-of-working of the individual teams.

To compensate for this, companies usually introduce an additional tool which is focused on board collaboration (e.g. Miro).

These tools simulate the pinning of colorful sticky papers on a large wall to visualize the planning process.

These tools naturally have limitations; one of them is for example the graphical nature of the approach; planning board containers are not large enough for just two additional stickies; resizing will influence the entire layout and soon enough just arranging the cards in a meaningful order and dealing with disruptive changes will eat up more and more of your time.

This is not flow; agile is meant to place more focus on content and less focus on organizational overhead.

There are many more pitfalls usually encountered, which are too numerous to list here but you get the hang of it.

All of these experiences during multiple product-organization-related large scale transformation projects have lead to the creation of several releases of a supplementary meta tool, which can ease some of the challenges encountered.

The latest incarnation is called Zingoolarity and has a subtitle of:

A super-simple and cost-free web application to manage many aspects of your product organization and optionally the roadmaps of your teams.

You will learn more about this free and open source app in the upcoming chapter "The Zingoolarity App".