How do I lay out a roadmap if there is only one big feature that I'm not able to breakdown?

Question

I'm basically developing a dashboard where we need to show the top 20 sales by product and country. The dashboard is visualized in an analytics platform, so nothing must be developed there, the visualization is known and done and the data source is built.

However, during 6 months we struggled to get the final calculation right. It's not even close to the common knowledge of the business by the company.

We know that we need to investigate several issues, mainly related to business logic, exceptions, data cleaning, data ingestion etc, so it will be another long period of troubleshooting until we get it right.

How can I made a roadmap out of troubleshooting activities?

Answer 1

It seems that you have already broken down the work in your mind (logic, exceptions, data quality, etc). Sit down with the people who say the calculation is wrong, make a list of the issues and prioritise them.

Another thing to consider. Does the dashboard give end users sufficient visibility of the underlying data and lineage? If so then the users can help pinpoint the problems; if not then maybe improvements to the dashboard could also go on the product backlog. Once you have a backlog with some priority items that the team can estimate then you'll have some clarity about the way forward.