Popular roadmaps guide

Before you begin, make sure the items you wish to visualize have timeframes assigned to them. 

To make a high-level objective roadmap:

1. Create a new timeline board, preferably within a relevant teamspace. Where you put the board also impacts how other members of your workspace can access it. 
   
   
    
2. On the Board controls sidebar, under Items, click Add items and select Objective as your first item type.
3. Click Add items again and select Initiative.
4. Leave Hide empty items unchecked for now. You can always turn it on later if you want.
5. Under Filters, click Add filter. Select Objectives where Objective Status is none of Completed. This will hide any completed objectives from the timeline and keep you focused on the future. 
6. Repeat Step 5, but select Initiatives instead. 

7. Your Board controls should look something like the image below. Click Apply when you're ready. 
    

   
    

8. Click Card customization.
   
   
    
9. Under Timeframe visualization, set Linked items in time to On. This makes the board's subordinate items display their own timeframes instead of conforming to their parents'.
10. Under Attributes, click Objectives, then toggle on Key results, Owner, and Work progress. 
11. Under Attributes, click Initiatives, then toggle on Owner and Health. 
    
    
     
12. Click Save. This ensures others can see the board as you've configured it. 
    
    
     

The high-level objective roadmap described above uses objectives, initiatives, and key results to manage complexity at a large scale—plenty of teams, products, and resources all working cross-functionally to achieve huge goals. Organizations with these requirements are usually on the Enterprise plan. 

If your organization is smaller or less complex, you may be on a lower-level plan that lacks some of the tools mentioned above. That doesn't mean you can't build something similar, though. Here are a couple ideas:

Pro plan: Objectives and features without initiatives or key results

Instead of selecting Initiatives as your secondary item type (beneath objectives), choose Features. This will make your roadmap a little less high-level, since you'll be able to see individual work items instead of broader project areas, but the overall structure will be similar. You can still apply the same card customizations to features as you would to initiatives. 

Key results are trickier to emulate, since they're pretty unique. Without them, we suggest you do what we did before we introduced key results to Productboard and simply include them in the descriptions of your objectives. That way you can still access them on the roadmap by clicking on an objective to open its details. 

All plans: Use releases to group features together

Regardless of your plan level, you can always create as many features and releases as you like. Releases are, fundamentally, just buckets of features, so feel free to take a very loose interpretation of the word 'release' and use them to represent objectives if you can't use actual objectives.  

Just remember that you'll need to set up your filters to only show the releases you want. If you're on an Essentials plan, you won't have access to release groups, so you'll might need to do a lot of filtering if you have a lot of releases. 

You can put key results into the descriptions of your releases, so you can still access them from the roadmap. In any case, the end result is structurally quite similar to the Enterprise-level version shown above!

To make a kanban board:

1. Create a new columns board, preferably within a relevant teamspace. Where you put the board also impacts how other members of your workspace can access it. 
   
   
    
2. On the Board controls sidebar, under Items, click Add items and select Feature as your first item type.
3. Click Add items again and select Subfeature.
4. Leave Hide empty items unchecked for now. You can always turn it on later if you want.
5. Under Filters, click Add filter. Select Features where Feature status is any of [your desired statuses]. Your status options and which ones you choose will depend on your existing workflow and whether you've customized your feature statuses.
6. (Optional) If this board is meant to deal with a subset of your workspace's products, add another filter.  Select Product hierarchy where Product hierarchy is any of [your chosen products].
7. (Optional) If this board is for one or more specific teams, add another filter.  Select Features where Features > Teams is any of [your chosen team(s)]. 
8. Under Columns, select Status. Those statuses which you excluded in Step 5 will be hidden automatically. 
9. Your Board controls should look something like the image below. Click Apply when you're ready.
   
   
   
    
10. Click Card customization.
    
    
    
     
11. Under Attributes, click Features, then toggle on Owner, Health, and Effort. 
    
    
    
     
12. Click Save. This ensures others can see the board as you've configured it.  
    
    

Note: If you're on the Pro plan or higher, you can swimlane your kanban board into teams. From Board controls > Groups, click Add grouping and select Teams.

Before you begin, make sure the items you wish to visualize have timeframes assigned to them. 

To make an initiative overview roadmap:

1. Create a timeline board, preferably within a relevant teamspace. Where you put the board also impacts how other members of your workspace can access it. 
   
   
    
2. On the Board controls sidebar, under Items, click Add items and select Initiative as your first item type.
3. Click Add items again and select Feature.
4. Check the Hide empty items box so that empty initiatives will remain hidden.
5. (Optional) If this board is meant to deal with a subset of your workspace's products, under Filters, click Add filter.  Select Product hierarchy where Product hierarchy is any of [your chosen products].
6. Under Groups, click Add grouping and select Teams. This will help your audience build an understanding of who's doing what on the EPD side. 

7. Your Board controls should look something like the image below. Click Apply when you're ready.
   
    

   

   
    

8. Click Card customization.
   
   
   
    
9. Under Timeframe visualization, set Linked items in time to On. This makes the board's subordinate items display their own timeframes instead of conforming to their parents'.
10. Under Card attributes, click Initiatives, then toggle on Objectives. This gives the audience an idea of which strategic business goals each initiative is driving toward.
    
    
    
     
11. Click Save. This ensures others can see the board as you've configured it. 
    
    

The initiative overview roadmap shown above uses initiatives, which are only available on Enterprise plans. Furthermore, the roadmap uses teams for clear organization, which are only available on Pro plans or higher.

If you're on a lower plan, you can still make something similar. Here are some ideas.

All plans: Use releases instead of initiatives

The point of initiatives is to bucket your features together into groups. Releases and objectives can both do that, and they can both accept important data like timeframes and ownership assignments. 

At the Pro level, you've only got a limited number of objectives, so you might want to save them for tracking actual strategic goals in your workspace. That leaves you with releases; make them your main item type from Board controls. Then, since releases can't be grouped by team, go down to Groups and use Owner instead. 

The one other functionality you're missing is the ability to link your bucketing item (releases) up to your objectives so that they appear nested on your roadmap. To make sure your audience can still see which features are contributing to which objectives (if you use them), you can click Card attributes > Features and toggle on the Objectives visualization option. 

Note: If you're on a Starter or Essentials plan, you only get one objective, so you won't be adding much useful data if you activate Card attributes > Objectives. Skip that step to make your roadmap cleaner.