How to create a Kanban roadmap

A Kanban roadmap can be a great way to track your features across your discovery and delivery lifecycle. This roadmap organizes features by status. You can learn more about feature statuses in Productboard in this article.

In this article:

• How to create a Kanban roadmap
• When should I use a Kanban roadmap?
• Learn more about using Kanban roadmaps

How to create a Kanban roadmap

Create your roadmap

1. Navigate to your Roadmap board.
2. From the drop-down menu, select Create Roadmap.

1. Select Kanban roadmap from the left menu.
2. Click Choose roadmap.

1. Click Add status.
2. Select a status from the menu to create your first column.

Add or rearrange status columns

1. Click [+] to add a new status column.
2. Click ・・・ to add a status column to the left or the right.
3. Click and hold a status to drag and drop the column.

Add features to a Kanban roadmap

There are three ways to add a feature to a Kanban roadmap:

1. Click [+] in a status column to search for an existing feature. If the feature has another status, the feature status will change to match that of the column.
2. Click [+] in a status column to create a new feature. The feature will automatically be assigned the status of the column.
3. From the features board, click the status of a feature to select one of the statuses you're viewing on your roadmap.

Keep in mind that you can also perform step 3 by dragging and dropping a feature to another status when viewing the Features board by status:

How to organize your Kanban roadmap

1. Click Settings to open up the configurations menu.
2. Select Swimlanes to organize your roadmap horizontally.
3. Toggle Effort to display story points on each feature card.
4. Click on the People section and select which avatar you want to visualize on each feature card - Owner, Teams, or Custom Member field.
5. Scale and Enterprise plans: Toggle Objectives to display any objectives associated with that feature.
6. Toggle Show hidden cards to display feature and subfeature cards that have been manually hidden from contributors.
7. Toggle Show subfeatures to display associated subfeature cards.

Organize by hierarchy

1. Click on Settings in the top right corner to access additional organization options.
2. Select Hierarchy to group feature ideas by their relevant components or sub-components.
3. Hover over a component and click the down-facing caret which appears in order to hide or expand its associated features.

Organize by objectives (available on Scale and Enterprise plans)

1. Click on Settings in the top right corner to access additional organization options.
2. Select Objectives to group feature ideas by their relevant objective.
3. Toggle Priority to display how important this feature is towards the overarching objective.
4. Toggle Team to display the team associated with the overarching objective.
5. Click the down-facing caret on an objective to hide or expand its associated features.
6. Drag and drop your objectives to adjust the order in which they're displayed.

How to share and export your Kanban roadmap

1. After making any configuration changes, click Save roadmap. You will see confirmation once your roadmap changes have been saved, and the Save button will now read Share.
2. Click Share to configure your roadmap sharing settings.
3. Click Print to print your roadmap.
4. Click Export to image to generate a PNG of your roadmap.

When should I use a Kanban roadmap?

Kanban roadmaps are good for:

• You're a team using working in a dual track agile approach.
• You're using a continuous release process without fixed releases or versions.
• Communicating at a high level with product leadership: are we blocked? are we moving ideas out of our backlog and into delivery?
• Communicating with teams already using a Kanban board to organize their work.
• Product teams with lots of granular statuses. Colorful icons do the trick when there are only a few possible statuses, but if you're trying to track >5 statuses, a Kanban view is easier to follow.

Kanban roadmaps might not be good for:

• Measuring progress against strict deadlines with specific milestones. Consider a Features Timeline roadmap instead.
• A huge features backlog that needs cleaning up. Try a simpler Now-next-later roadmap to render order out of chaos.
• Customer-facing teams, who will want more specific release timelines. Try a Releases timeline plan.

Learn more about using Kanban roadmaps

• Guide: Plan releases to decide what to deliver when
• Guide: Choose the right roadmap for your audience