ProductGo Basics #3: How to use Roadmap

ProductGo Basics #3_ How to use roadmap

Building successful products requires clear planning, organized execution, and alignment across teams. ProductGo’s Roadmap feature brings these elements together, offering a customizable tool that visualizes your product’s timeline and progress. Whether you’re planning your next release or managing long-term product milestones, ProductGo helps your team stay focused, agile, and aligned.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the Roadmap feature, a powerful way to create, link, and track epics, stories, and milestones within Jira.

What is ProductGo’s Roadmap?

The Roadmap is a visual representation of your project’s strategic plan. It provides a clear, high-level view of your goals, epics, user stories, and their timelines, showing how everything connects. The Roadmap helps teams visualize their work in relation to time, making it easier to plan, prioritize, and track progress.

Key Features

ProductGo’s Roadmap integrates seamlessly with Jira, using your existing issues and workflows to build a comprehensive timeline. You can:

  • Link epics and stories to releases for a structured view of your project.
  • Organize by sprint or release to match your team’s development cadence.
  • Track milestones to keep everyone aligned on key dates and deliverables.
  • Drag-and-drop simplicity for easy adjustments as your project evolves.

Whether your team uses Scrum or Kanban, ProductGo’s Roadmap adapts to your workflow, providing flexibility and structure as needed.

Why Roadmapping is Essential in Product Development

The Roadmap provides several critical benefits to modern product teams:

  • Strategic Planning: Enables teams to prioritize tasks based on business goals, ensuring that resources are used effectively.
  • Clear Communication: Provides a visual tool that aligns stakeholders, showing exactly what’s in development and what’s coming next.
  • Stakeholder Alignment: Keeps everyone—from product managers to executives—on the same page regarding the project’s trajectory.
  • Resource Allocation: Helps you allocate development resources where they are needed most, avoiding bottlenecks.
  • Flexibility and Adaptability: Allows you to adjust your roadmap in response to new insights, feedback, or market changes, ensuring you stay on course.

Getting Started with the Roadmap

Step 1: Access the Roadmap Feature

To access the Roadmap in ProductGo, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the Story Map screen in ProductGo.
  2. Click the Roadmap button at the top of the screen to open the Roadmap view.

Slide1 Access to the Roadmap feature

Step 2: Choose Your View Mode

ProductGo offers three ways to visualize your Roadmap, depending on your project needs:

  • Goal/Step/Story: Organize your work from high-level goals down to user stories.
  • Sprints: Track progress by organizing work into sprints.
  • Releases: Focus on organizing work by release dates and deliverables.

Slide2 Choose view mode

Simply select your preferred view from the dropdown menu on the Gantt chart.

Step 3: Create a New Release or Sprint

If your team already has Releases or Sprints in Jira, you can skip this step. Otherwise, follow these steps:

  1. Move your cursor to the end of the timeline, where you want to create a new Release or Sprint.
  2. A blue line with a “+” icon will appear. Click it.
  3. Fill in the details to create the new Release or Sprint.

Slide3 Create a new Release or Sprint

Step 4: Drag and Drop Issues

Once your Releases or Sprints are set up, simply drag and drop issues from the backlog or other Sprints into the current one. You can also use the Issues without Epics button to quickly organize orphaned issues.

Slide4 Drag and drop the issues to the Sprint_Release

Step 5: Create Milestones

To add a milestone, you have two options:

  • Hover over the Milestone row and click the green diamond icon where you want the milestone.
  • Click the “+” button in the Milestone row and enter the milestone details.

Slide5 Create Milestones

Step 6: Plan Goals, Epics, and Stories

To assign timelines to Goals, Epics, or Stories:

  1. Click on the Gantt chart in the row corresponding to the issue you want to plan.
  2. A bar representing the task’s duration will appear, which you can adjust by dragging.

Slide6 Plan Goals_Epics_Stories

The default length is 1 day but you can drag it sideways to extend it.

Step 7: Link Issues

To link related issues, hover over a task bar until a circle appears. Drag the circle to the related task to create a visual link between them, helping to show dependencies.

Slide7 Link the issues

Best Practices for Roadmapping

  • Align Roadmaps with Business Goals: Start with your high-level objectives and make sure your Roadmap supports them.
  • Keep it Agile: Regularly update your Roadmap to reflect progress, adjustments, or changing priorities.
  • Use Milestones Wisely: Milestones should represent significant achievements, such as the completion of a major feature or release.
  • Communicate Clearly: Share the Roadmap regularly with stakeholders to maintain alignment.
  • Keep It Simple: Avoid overloading your Roadmap with too much detail—focus on what matters most.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

  • Overcomplicating the Roadmap: Keep your Roadmap focused on the big picture.
  • Neglecting Updates: A static Roadmap is useless. Keep it alive by revisiting and updating it frequently.
  • Ignoring Dependencies: Make sure to link related tasks to highlight dependencies and avoid delays.

Need Help?

We’re here to make sure you succeed with ProductGo:

Ready to make product management easier? Try ProductGo free for 30 days and see the difference it can make for your team.

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Final Words

ProductGo’s Roadmap feature is a powerful tool for transforming product development from chaotic to cohesive. By providing a clear, visual representation of your team’s work, it helps align everyone on goals, timelines, and progress. Whether you’re launching a new product or iterating on an existing one, a well-maintained Roadmap is essential for staying on track and delivering value to your users.

Keep in mind, a Roadmap is more than just a plan; it’s a shared vision of your product’s future. Keep it simple, keep it current, and let ProductGo help you lead your team toward success.

ProductGo Basics #2: How to use User Story Map
ProductGo Basics #4: How to use Portfolio Board

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