Product Roadmap Design Elements: Best Practices and Guide

How should you display information on your product roadmap? It depends, but here are some common design elements and how to use them.

Product roadmaps are planning documents that help product management teams communicate the steps they’ll take to accomplish their product vision and strategy. When successful, product roadmaps align stakeholders and help you explain the feature prioritization decisions you made.

Roadmaps typically includes information like:

• Themes and business goals

• Feature requests

• Timeframes for releases

• Status or progress indicators

• Resource allocations

• Customer feedback data

(Here’s everything you need to know about what goes on a roadmap.)

Great… but Kareem: What’s the best way to format a roadmap? What should it look like?

Good question. It’s up to you—it depends on what information you’re including, who the audience is, and how best you think that they should read that information.

In this article, I’ll go through the common product roadmap elements used to communicate information and how best to use them.

Overall aims for roadmap design

Let’s start with the basics. Here are some overarching principles when considering what to make your roadmap look like.

• Clarity and simplicity. Less is more. A good product roadmap should be easy to understand at a glance. I suggest sticking to a clean, simple design that conveys the essential information without overwhelming the viewer. Use clear language and avoid jargon.

• Visual hierarchy. Organize your roadmap in a way that highlights the most important information. Use font size, color, and other visual elements to create a clear hierarchy that guides the viewer's eye.

• Flexibility and adaptability. Ensure your roadmap is easy to update and adapt as priorities and timelines shift. This might involve using a digital tool or designing your roadmap in such a way that it's easy to make changes without redoing the entire document.

• Tailored for stakeholders. Think about your audience and what they need. Your Dev team might want detailed time frames and planning on their roadmap. But it may be better to keep time frames vague for external stakeholders. Use elements that make sense for each audience. (You may even need to create different versions of the roadmap for different groups.)

• Justification of decisions. Last, my business partner Ryan and I have come to believe in evidence-based roadmaps—a version of product roadmaps that displays metrics and data that justifies your product decisions. That could be the ICE score, RICE score, or customer feedback data (like MRR)—whatever helped you decide to build these features and not others.

Guide: Prioritization frameworks for choosing features for your roadmap

Product roadmap components and how to use them

How exactly you build your roadmap depends on your team’s needs, whether you’re using a specific framework (like agile, scrum, etc.), and the structure of your product portfolio. Still, there are some foundational roadmap design elements that you’ll probably use.

Here are the most common product roadmap elements and what they’re good for.

Note: These are the design components and elements to make your roadmap easy to understand. Make sure you also understand what information should go on your roadmap.

1. Bars

Bars are used to represent tasks, projects, or product features and their duration. They are particularly helpful in visualizing the timeline of these items, showing when they are planned to start and end. Bar elements are commonly used in Gantt charts—a popular type of roadmap used for project management.

In this very simple example roadmap, bars are used to represent stages of development for an app—for example, “testing” and “deployment”.

Best practices for bars:

• Length. The length of the bar should represent the duration of the task or project. Make sure to use a consistent scale across all items on the roadmap to ensure easy comparisons.

• Use colors and patterns. Assign different colors or patterns to bars based on their category, status, or priority level. This helps create a visual distinction and makes the roadmap easier to understand.

• Connect dependencies. If certain tasks or projects are dependent on others, use lines or arrows to connect the related bars. This helps visualize dependencies and potential bottlenecks in the project.

2. Containers

In a product roadmap, containers refer to sections or groups that hold related tasks, features, or projects. They are useful for organizing and categorizing items on the roadmap, making it easier for stakeholders to understand the overall structure and priorities. Containers can take different forms, such as columns, swimlanes, or boxes, depending on the specific roadmap format you're using.

Best practices for containers:

• Group logically. Organize items in containers based on logical relationships, such as project phases, teams, product areas, or themes. This helps create a clear structure and makes it easier for stakeholders to understand the roadmap's content.

• Use clear labels. Label each container clearly so stakeholders can easily understand what it represents. This may include using headings, icons, color-coding, or even tooltips to enhance readability.

• Choose the right format. Select a container format that best fits your roadmap's purpose and audience. For example, swimlanes might be ideal for visualizing parallel workstreams, while columns or boxes could be better suited for organizing items by priority or category.

Common containers include columns, swimlanes, and boxes. Here's when to use each.

Swimlanes

Swimlanes represent parallel workstreams. They are arranged horizontally and help organize features into teams, product areas, or even different products. Swimlanes make it easy for stakeholders to understand relationships between items and track progress across multiple groups or areas simultaneously.

Columns

Columns organize tasks, projects, or product features vertically based on categories, priorities, or stages. They help create a structured layout that makes it easy for stakeholders to understand the relationships and progression of items.

This Savio roadmap uses column containers to separate features by time frame.

Boxes

Boxes are visual elements that enclose and group related tasks, projects, features, or information based on categories, themes, or priorities. They help create a clean and organized layout, making it easy for stakeholders to identify and understand the connections between items. Boxes serve as a versatile way to visually present information, offering a clear and compartmentalized view of various roadmap elements.

This Savio roadmap uses boxes to represent feature requests. Each box helps the viewer understand the information (including MRR and number of requests) associated with each feature.

3. Dates and timelines

Roadmaps are planning documents, so they typically include some notion of time—when new features are planned to start, progress, and finish. Timeframes help stakeholders gain visibility into the product plan and track milestones.

How detailed should you get with timeframes? It depends.

I agree with others that you should stay away from specific dates—leave them for the release plan. Here’s why: roadmaps are planning documents and they are somewhat uncertain. They can change. You don’t want your stakeholders to come back to your product team and say, “Why aren’t you delivering this? Your roadmap said you would.”

But if your roadmap is for internal stakeholders—like your development team, you might trust them to understand the revisionary nature of roadmaps and so feel comfortable including more specific timelines.

Whichever side you fall on, just remember that the goal of your roadmap is to explain how you’ll implement your product strategy. It’s not to provide a fixed set of dates and tasks to accomplish (that’s typically what a release plan is for).

Timelines can take different formats, such as linear, circular, or calendar-based, depending on the specific roadmap style and preferences.

This Savio roadmap uses very vague timeframes—now, next, and later. You can include more specific timeframes if you like.

Best practices for dates or timeline elements on a roadmap:

• Consistent scale. Ensure that the timeline uses a consistent scale throughout the roadmap, making it easy for stakeholders to compare durations and identify key milestones.

• Clear time markers. Provide clear time markers, such as months, quarters, or years, depending on the level of granularity needed.

• Keep it up to date. Regularly update the timeline to reflect any changes in plans or priorities, ensuring stakeholders have accurate and current information.

• Maintain flexibility. Choose a timeline format that helps your users understand the uncertainty baked into your timelines.

4. Milestones

Milestones are significant events or achievements on a roadmap, such as the completion of a critical feature, a new product launch, or reaching a specific business goal. They act as checkpoints for assessing progress and help stakeholders understand the project's trajectory. Milestones can include events such as product launches, feature completions, or reaching specific goals.

In this example, there’s a milestone indicated on the roadmap with a star. The milestone is a goal to have 5,000 users by the 4th quarter. This is an example of a goal-based roadmap

Best practices for using milestones on a roadmap:

• Be selective. Choose only the most critical or impactful events as milestones to avoid cluttering your roadmap and diluting its focus.

• Use clear, concise labels. Label each milestone with a brief, descriptive title that conveys its significance, making it easy for stakeholders to understand its importance.

• Visually distinguish milestones. Use distinct visual elements, such as icons, bold text, or color-coding, to differentiate milestones from other roadmap items, drawing attention to these key moments.

• Align with the timeline. Position milestones along the roadmap's timeline to show their chronological order and relationship to other tasks or projects.

• Regularly review and update. As your project progresses, review and update milestones to reflect any changes in plans or priorities, ensuring stakeholders have accurate and current information.

5. Tags

Tags are a visual element used in roadmaps to label and categorize tasks, initiatives, or features based on specific attributes—priority, status, functionality, team assignment, and so on. They help stakeholders quickly identify and understand key aspects of each item and facilitate interpretation of the roadmap.

In this example of a Savio roadmap, some features have a tag to indicate that they’re for acquisition.

Best practices for using tags on a roadmap:

• Keep it simple. Use a limited number of tags to avoid overwhelming the viewer and diluting the focus of your roadmap.

• Be consistent. Apply a consistent tagging system across all items on the roadmap to make it easy for stakeholders to understand and compare items at a glance.

• Visually distinguish tags. Use distinct visual elements, such as color-coding, icons, or font styles, to differentiate tags and make them easily recognizable.

6. Contextual information

I advocate for including other information that gives context about why you made the product decisions you did. That can include customer feedback data or metrics like a feature’s cumulative MRR (the total MRR of all the customers that asked for a feature).

This data helps ensure that your product roadmap aligns with customer needs and expectations. It also helps reduce conflict when different stakeholders don’t initially agree on chosen features.

Guide: How to use customer feedback to get stakeholder buy-in

On Savio roadmaps, you can choose to display customer data and other feature request attributes like number of requests, cumulative MRR, opportunity revenue, lost deal MRR, and more.

Best practices for using customer feedback data on a roadmap:

• Link feedback to roadmap items. Connect specific customer feedback data points to features on the roadmap. This helps you justify the product development decisions you made.

• Include relevant data for your audience. Not all information is relevant for all stakeholders. Tailor the information you include to suit the intended target group.

• Maintain transparency. Clearly communicate how customer feedback data has been incorporated into the roadmap and the impact it has had on the product development process.

Product roadmapping tools

The design components you can use depend heavily on the tools you’re using to create your product roadmap.

We’ve outlined some of the most common and popular roadmapping tools here. Check them out to find a tool that can build the type of roadmap that you’re looking for.

Up next:

• Types of roadmaps and their use cases
• Product roadmap prioritization guide

Last Updated: 2023-05-11

Want more articles like this?

Product Leaders from Slack, Zapier, and Appcues read our newsletter to delight customers, lower churn, and grow revenue.

Send me more articles like this

Unsubscribe anytime.