Hi Eric, thanks for chiming in! Definitely a sliding scale when it come to “agile”, no doubt. This post is focused specifically on planning, but if you take a look at some of our other posts on agile product management you might be able to get a better sense of how we see planning and roadmaps fitting into the continuous agile feedback loop. Here’s one post you might find interesting: https://www.productplan.com/roadmaps-continuous-delivery/

Jeremy

Thank you for this article. One of the best so far in addressing the planning concerns of Agile.

Thank you very much for reading the article and especially thank you for taking the time to leave a comment.

You’re correct that the article doesn’t explicitly mention technical practices like continuous integration or continuous deployment. I also couldn’t agree more that building a customer feedback loop into your process that fosters ongoing product discovery is critical to your product’s ultimate success.

However, each layer of the Planning Onion is intended to be repeated in a cycle, with the frequency of each cycle increasing as you move towards the bottom of the onion. Within each cycle, teams following this approach will incorporate feedback that’s relevant to that layer in order to ensure the next cycle builds on what was learned in the previous cycles. For example, each visioning cycle will include feedback learned from the product’s fit in the overall market, such as broader market acceptance or how the product compares to competing products that have been released since the previous cycle.

By the same token, each release planning cycle will take into account information learned from the previous release planning cycle such as how the product’s customer base responded to certain features in the previous release. This information might drive decisions such as whether new features should be expanded upon, alternative features should be investigated, or even whether existing features should be considered for removal in an upcoming release.

By using multiple layers recurring in different cycles, teams who use the Planning Onion often find that they are better positioned to not only integrate customer feedback into their different planning cycles but to also identify which type of feedback is appropriate to which layer of planning so each piece of feedback can be used in the most effective way.

Thank you again for taking the time to read the article, Eric. I sincerely appreciate you for taking the time to share your thoughts.

Best,
Jeremy