At Carvana, I created a product development checklist (I can already hear the yawns) that I named, the ‘Milestones Tracker’ to help ensure junior PMs at Carvana were considering all relevant activities and respective artifacts to generate throughout the product lifecycle. It’s a work in progress, but here it is…
Status: top level project life cycle phases in our Roadmap.
Milestone: a major achievement within a project's ******life cycle that must be completed for the project to move to the next Status. By this definition, statuses are not milestones, and milestones are not statuses.
Marker: key tasks that must be completed to hit a respective milestone.
For us to plan more effectively, we need a shared understanding of how projects get completed; e.g. the process— the statuses, milestones and markers, some required, others optional, which collectively define a project’s life cycle. Once we align on our process we can more easily understand WHERE in the process we currently are, define WHAT needs to be completed to move to the next status, and then communicate WHEN we expect to completed markers, achieve milestones and eventually hit our ultimate goal— Status = Shipped.
We hope that by defining each Roadmap status and their respective (optional or required) Milestones and Markers we can more precisely and concisely track and communicate progress toward Shipped.
This document centers on three statuses— In Discovery, In Design, Ready for Development, and (WIP) Ready for Release status. The rationale: We have plenty of visibility for the In Development status via Jira. Icebox, Backlog and Prioritized status require little of our attention day-to-day.