How to build a product roadmap
An annual roadmap for four product teams: sixteen initiatives across four quarters and three themes, with a summer break and a holiday freeze. The same roadmap appears below as a board by quarter, a summarized year, a Gantt chart by team and a flowchart, and the views stay in step.
Roadmap by quarter: the year at a glance
Each team has a row and each quarter a column. The color shows the theme: Foundations, Growth or Reliability.
Read a column to see what the company commits to in a quarter, and a row to see one team's year. The first quarter is foundations everywhere, the second and third are mostly growth and the fourth turns to reliability. Moving a card to another column changes its quarter, not its dates.
Summarized year: when each quarter's work really runs
The same initiatives on a calendar, summarized by their quarter. Each summary bar runs from the first start to the last end of the work in that quarter. In your own copy, fold the quarters with their arrows to read the year as four bars.
Quarter is a category of its own, not a date. Drag Mobile launch into October and it stays in Q3: the Q3 summary stretches into the fourth quarter, showing that the promise and the plan no longer agree. Move the card on the board as well, or move the work back. The summer break leaves the third quarter only August and September.
Gantt chart: what each team does when
Grouped by team, with the summer break and the holiday freeze as time off.
Milestones mark what customers will notice: API available in June, Mobile app in stores in September and the Annual review in December. Each follows its own work: dragging Mobile launch later moves Mobile app in stores and Mobile quality, which waits for the launch, with it.
Flowchart: how the work depends on earlier work
Each team builds on its own earlier work: identity before the public API, the design system before onboarding, offline sync before the mobile beta. Dragging a foundation later moves every initiative after it by the same number of work days, so the first quarter carries the most risk.
Make it yours
- Choose Open in Tidigar under any view to get your own copy. It is free, needs no account and stays on your device.
- Rename the teams and themes, and replace the initiatives with your own.
- Set each initiative's quarter on the board and its dates on the timeline; check the summarized year for quarters that run over.
- Share the board for an overview and the Gantt chart to discuss timing.
Frequently asked questions
Should a product roadmap have dates? Show quarters to the outside and keep dates inside the teams. Tidigar keeps both in the same plan, and neither changes the other.
How many themes should a roadmap have? Three to five. Fewer hides trade-offs; more makes every color look the same.
How often should a roadmap change? Review it every quarter. Change the next quarter freely and the current one only when something important happened.