Deep Planner

Today I'm launching a new concept called "Honest Roadmaps" that represents the following key principles:

1. Data-driven sequencing

2. Well-balanced schedules

3. Alignment between teams and stakeholders

Many companies nowadays:

• Guess or pick estimates based on personal judgement

• Promise dates to clients without verification with teams

• Assign multiple work items to the same team

All of that quite negatively affects companies' performance, downgrades deliverability and leads to burnout of teams.

The principles of "Honest roadmaps" should help companies create well-balanced, realistic and predictable roadmaps that benefits both teams and stakeholders.

If you are interested to learn more visit https://honestroadmaps.com or reach out to me directly!

There are many tools on the market which offer Gantt charts, ticket management, creating beautiful diagrams. However, those tools are static and don't represent a single living ecosystem.

In software development, many things work as a symphony rather than a mono sound. When asking for a delivery date, you can't just take an estimate, add it to the current day and say the resulting date as a promise. That would be the biggest lie on Earth. The real delivery date would be a date backed up by dependencies, teams capacity, alignment with other priorities on roadmap, adjusted by a risk buffer.

I've seen it many times again and again: product team asks for delivery dates. Engineering makes unrealistic assumptions and provides some date in the future. Product trusts that date with their own assumptions and communicates wrong commitments to senior leadership. The worst thing is: those assumptions are never recorded anywhere, they hold in the air until they fail on the first execution check-up.

The result? Development chaos, missed delivery dates, value streams slow down and companies underperform, while many engineers burn out trying to chase unrealistic plans.

It's time to fix it. Deep Planner is a tool designed for an effective product-engineering alignment. It gives visibility for: assumptions, dependencies, technical constraints, delivery sequence. It helps create a realistic picture by applying many of those constraints automatically to the timeline, so that human mistakes are minimized, and technical burden is eased.

Stop guessing the roadmap and start an effective alignment that will deliver realistic results shortly.

https://deepplanner.io

In conversations with product managers we often discuss how important it is to see what we commit to before the work starts. Indeed if we don't pay attention to risks we end up creating unrealistic plans:

1. Unscheduled dependencies result in unaccounted delays

2. Underestimation or overestimation corrupt the plans and cause teams overload

3. Excessive multi-tasking blurs developers focus and hits productivity

We've been working on a solution to prevent all these situations from happening: create a backlog execution simulation and visualize risks early.

It works pretty simple: you stuff the backlog into simulator, define teams, define time limits, you oversee roadmap scenario and see all issues and risks.

Ready to try? => Reply "Interested" on this post.

Want to explore solo? => Visit https://deepplanner.io

Have you ever wondered what is wrong with backlogs?

They have just a single dimension.

It works perfectly with one team and product that has no dependencies, risk management or teams that have drastically different specializations.

But that's far from reality of the real world.

In most companies and projects, we have all of this.

Instead of a linear path that shows everyone exactly one way to go we need a GPS that shows route for every team separately, but with a single source of truth.

I’ve been building Deep Planner to solve exactly this.

It’s got a forecasting engine that predicts short and mid-term outcomes in seconds, letting you run real-time simulations.

If a dev gets sick or a priority shifts, you don't just "re-rank" a list: you re-route the entire project.

You can try the product here: https://deepplanner.io

I’d love for the IH community to poke holes in this approach. How are you currently handling the "dependency hell" in your roadmaps?

Hello everyone,

Deep Planner has deployed a new feature: agile planning reports. The reports can be used to provide the roadmap status, generate a schedule draft or to design a new project. Available in web and PDF view and free for all users!
Visit https://deepplanner.io

Deep Planner is not only about technology, it is the way to rethink planning and enable ways to do it easier and more effectively.

After pilot use we discovered big improvements:

• Planning time has decreased by 70%

• We complete up to 90% of the backlog of all planned items

This is a big improvement over the earlier times where we were shaking to meet the deadlines and had much anxiety over reprioritization of items and shifting delivery dates.

The major change for us in the process is much higher control and confidence in what we are capable to do and how changes may affect our plans, on a big scale. Even if we change the schedule we all know and recognize the impact. This gives so much power in making even big adjustments.

Try Deep Planner and read more about the new process in this new article: https://blog.deepplanner.io/planning-methodologies/beyond-sprints-a-milestone-based-planning-model/

In startup environment it's super important to deliver fast.

What are the ways to accomplish that?

You could hire more workers, increase time shifts or even cancel your lunch.

But all of that wouldn't matter much without one thing - proper organizing your work.

There are a lot of tools in the industry that allow that: JIRA, MS Project, Aha, etc.

But all of them are not built for Agile. You can't just add a new priority task and expect your schedule to adjust. You can't change an estimate and see a direct impact on other tasks on the roadmap. All the tools lack integrity and don't look alive, they look like they are on ICU.

Deep Planner changes that. It makes planning more fun.

You don't need a spreadsheet to change a priority. You don't need to think about days and weekends on calendar to calculate delivery date after estimate change.

Just make a change you want and think about what's important - tasks and features.

Deep Planner will take care of your schedule and organize it for the best results!

Check out the app - https://deepplanner.io

We have released a new version of Deep Planner that includes wizard and a new Demo that showcases creating a roadmap from JIRA tickets in seconds. It is truly remarkable! Check the app website to access the new updates!