Agile Roadmapping: A management Tool for Digital Entrepreneurship

How to adapt and still get the full potential of roadmapping to the context of Digital Entrepreneurship (DE)? To answer this question and design an agile roadmapping approach to support highly incremental planning done by startups, this article unfolded through a three-phase action research program that lasted 40 months and involved three startups and two startup accelerators. Typically, startups are not complex organizations but operate in turbulent markets—requiring constant changes in strategy, organization, and product decisions. Such an environment is notably adherent to the assumptions of agile methods, but not so to roadmapping, an approach typically tuned for larger companies. Thus, the DE context is explored to adapt the roadmapping approach to agile principles aiming at offering a nimble, living, and integrated process that can enhance business, product, and organizational decisions in startups. Finally, the resulting method helps to support 1) strategic to operational management by continuous planning of small teams dealing with constant changes; 2) better communication between investors, technical, and business members; 3) better absorption of roadmapping and its benefits by teams already proficient in agile approaches, and 4) better balance between plan and action in startups.