Roadmaps for Enterprise use case examples – Product Management

Creating a product-centric roadmap

In Agile planning and product management, roadmaps are essential tools for visualizing planned strategic themes, epics, and features over a timeline. Roadmaps help in outlining major milestones, key feature deliverables, and dependencies, creating a shared understanding among stakeholders.

Executive decision-makers can view high-level strategic priorities and timelines, while teams can see how their work aligns with organizational goals.

Defining priorities and epics

In AgilePlace, start by defining high-level strategic priorities (for example, priorities related to innovation, growth, or operational efficiency). You can further beak down each priority into epics that represent major initiatives and then break down the epics into specific features to be developed.

At this point you can create AgilePlace cards to build out the strategy or work hierarchy, which can then be visualized in Planview Roadmaps.

Building a roadmap

Import cards:
- Build a roadmap quickly by importing cards from AgilePlace that have been started or are being planned.
- You can search for items to add to the roadmap by board, card type, lane, and then add all matching items at once.
  
  TIP
  
  Choose the level of detail for your roadmap based on your communication needs. For higher-level priorities, select the appropriate level of card type such as theme or epic. For detailed insights, import the cards that represent features.
Add future work:
- Add items as placeholders for planned work by clicking +Add item. These items remain in the left pane until you add start and finish dates or drag them to the timeline.
Add milestones:
- You can add roadmap milestones to communicate critical dates that appear at the top of the roadmap.
- To easily identify the different types of milestones, you can color code them. For example, you can color code milestones based on release dates, significant value delivery dates, and so on.
Organize the roadmap items:
- Once items are added, organize them into high-level strategic priorities or other key attributes such as priority, status, and so on, using color codes and grouping.
- Color code and group items based on existing attributes such as parent, card type, or status, or create custom attributes for this purpose.

Roadmap examples

To bring your product roadmap to life, start by reviewing the existing roadmap structure. Here's an example:

Theme: Innovation, 2025
- Epic: New Product Development
  - Feature: Market Research
  - Feature: Prototype Design
  - Feature: User Testing
- Epic: Technology Upgrade
  - Feature: System Integration
  - Feature: Performance Optimization
Theme: Growth, 2025
- Epic: Market Expansion
  - Feature: Regional Analysis
  - Feature: Marketing Campaign
- Epic: Customer Acquisition
  - Feature: Lead Generation
  - Feature: Sales Strategy
Objectives and Key Results
- Objective: Increase Market Share
  - Key Result: Achieve 20% growth in new customer acquisition
    - Feature: Lead Generation
    - Feature: Sales Strategy
- Objective: Enhance Product Quality
  - Key Result: Reduce defect rate by 15%
    - Feature: System Integration
    - Feature: Performance Optimization

Example 1 – Organizing a roadmap by parent themes or epics

If you are managing product-centric roadmaps and have linked AgilePlace cards to their parent epics, strategic themes, etc., then you can group your roadmap by Parent. The roadmap in the following image communicates both the progress of your parent strategic themes and the status of the underlying epics and features.

In the image, you can see that the "Growth, 2025" theme is half way completed and that the Customer Acquisition features have yet to be started.

Additionally, the "Market Research" feature within the New Product Development epic is blocked, which indicates there is a potential issue that needs to be addressed. You can use this visual to decide between the following actions:

more work needs to be focused on certain themes or epics
any of the finish dates needs to be postponed
specific blockers such as "Market Research" require immediate attention

Click to expand or shrink — Organize roadmap by parent

To organize a roadmap by AgilePlace Parent:

Group the roadmap items by Parent (AgilePlace).

To highlight status of the work:

Color the roadmap items by Status (AgilePlace).

Support for AgilePlace hierarchies video (6:15 minutes)

Example 2 – Organizing a roadmap by OKRs (objectives and key results)

If you are managing OKRs in Planview products and have linked AgilePlace cards to key results, then you can group roadmap items by objectives.

For more information about using OKRs in AgilePlace, see Understanding OKRs.

The roadmap in the following image shows both the progress of your objectives and the status of the underlying work items of the objective. You can see that the Enhance Product Quality objective is behind at 13% progress and that one feature is currently underway. Based on this visual representation, you can assess whether the current pace is sufficient or more work needs to be focused on this objective to accelerate progress.

Additionally, the "Uncategorized" section highlights features that are not yet associated with any OKRs. This provides an opportunity to evaluate these features and decide if they are worth pursuing independently or if they should be aligned with the appropriate objectives. By reviewing these uncategorized features, you can ensure that all work items contribute to your strategic objectives.

Using this visual tool, you can make informed decisions about prioritizing work, addressing any blockers, and aligning efforts with your key objectives. This approach enhances transparency, facilitates better planning, and ensures that your product development process is aligned with your overall strategy.

To organize a roadmap by OKRs:

Group the roadmap items by OKRs.

To highlight status of the work:

Color the roadmap items by Work status.

OKRs and Roadmaps video (7:21 minutes)

Generate work from a roadmap

Maintain a backlog of unplanned work, such as a list of epics or features. You can these items as placeholders in your roadmap. By dragging these items onto the timeline, you can visualize how they fit into your overall product strategy and existing planned work, which makes it easier to connect roadmap ideas to execution.

Additionally, you can generate cards in AgilePlace to represent these items, which ensures they are better governed. As these cards move through AgilePlace, the roadmap keeps these touchpoints updated, which provides a continuous link between strategic planning and execution.

The roadmap serves as a central touchpoint for various stages of ideation and execution, allowing you to capture a wide range of ideas and ensure they align with your product strategy. This approach allows for continuous ideation, where new ideas can be added to the backlog and visualized on the roadmap. As these ideas evolve into actionable items, they can be tracked and managed through AgilePlace, ensuring that every touchpoint is accounted for and governed effectively.

To generate an AgilePlace card from the roadmap:

Click on the roadmap item you want to convert.
In the details pane, click > Convert item to AgilePlace card.
Select the board that you want to add the card to and specify the card type.
To convert the roadmap item to an AgilePlace card, click Save.

Scenario planning

Scenario planning involves visualizing different potential outcomes by adjusting the timeline of various roadmap items. Using this process you can explore various "what-if" scenarios that enable you to anticipate challenges and opportunities. By shifting items and their dates, you can see how changes can impact your roadmap, which helps you to make informed decisions about future commitments.

You can do scenario planning by duplicating a roadmap and changing dates. Using the date difference mode, you can show date changes that result from your "what-if" adjustments. This feature allows you to compare the original timeline with the adjusted one, which highlights the impact of your changes.

Additionally, duplicating a roadmap enables you to save versions of it in various states, which provides a record of different planning scenarios for future reference. This is particularly useful for presenting alternative plans to stakeholders, as it allows the stakeholders to see the potential outcomes and make informed decisions based on the different scenarios.

To duplicate a roadmap:

In the upper right corner of the roadmap, click > Duplicate roadmap.
Provide a name and description for the new roadmap and/or roadmap contents.

Evaluate roadmap progress

Planview Roadmaps for Enterprise provides a living roadmap and not just a snapshot. You can evaluate high level progress of roadmap items at a glance when the connected AgilePlace items are color coded and grouped by status. For example, Agile work items can be color coded by the status of lanes in a board such as Started, Not started, Finished, and so on.

When the connected item is updated either manually or by workflow in AgilePlace, the status of the corresponding roadmap item is updated automatically. If the dates of any of the connected items shift, the roadmap items that are affected by the changed dates are immediately highlighted with orange lines.

You can investigate the changes by viewing the details pane of the roadmap items. If you require more information, you can link directly to the connected item in AgilePlace.

With access to this information from roadmaps, you can make more informed choices in real time.

Use filters to focus on specific roadmap areas

While you are reviewing a roadmap, you can use filters to focus on certain areas. For example, the following roadmap is focused on roadmap items that have a date difference and are currently blocked.

You can save sets of filter criteria that you use regularly for your own use or share them with all users of the same roadmap.

Quickly respond to changes

With a connected roadmap, you can better respond to shifting priorities and delivery changes without losing sight of the overall vision. A roadmap provides a centralized and consistent framework for regularly assessing progress. The system of record for the connected items on the roadmap is AgilePlace, which is where the annual and quarterly planning occurs.

Connected items are updated with changes from the source product, in this case AgilePlace, for example any additional custom fields, priorities, or blockers. You can also navigate to the AgilePlace card from the roadmap item to get more information and to investigate further.

Dates are not immediately updated in order to give you time to review and assess the changes before they are reflected on the roadmap. This ensures that you have the opportunity to understand the impact of these changes on your overall plan and make any necessary adjustments to maintain alignment with your roadmap’s objectives and timelines.

To visualize date changes between the roadmap and Agileplace, you can click the clock icon in the upper right. AgilePlace dates will be superimposed on the roadmap and highlighted in orange. After you have reviewed the date changes, you can update the roadmap to display the current AgilePlace dates.

Keep stakeholders aligned on the roadmap

Using Planview Roadmaps for Enterprise, you can keep leadership and delivery teams aligned and updated about the objectives or goals that you’re working toward. Roadmaps provide sequencing and clear insight into priorities from ideation, to assessment, to build, to delivery process. You can directly focus and realign groups where necessary.

Add users to a roadmap

You specify whether individual stakeholders have view access only or edit access to make changes to the roadmap.

Stakeholders can use a direct link to a roadmap or view a list of all roadmaps they have access to.

Export a roadmap snapshot for sharing externally

You can export a snapshot of the roadmap, with the option to specify the time range to be exported.

The exported snapshot includes the information exactly as it is currently displayed on the roadmap. That is, groups that are collapsed in the roadmap are also collapsed in the snapshot.