How_to_use_this_template
📖 How to use this template
This roadmap is the work, not a picture of the work. Every row you see here is a real task someone can open, assign and finish. That is the whole point: a roadmap kept in a slide deck drifts from reality by about week two, because nothing forces the two to agree.
- Duplicate this project into your own organization (dropdown next to the project name, then
Duplicate) - Delete the sample features. Keep the sections, statuses and fields.
- Rename the releases in the Release field to yours, and move the three gate milestones to your real dates.
- Put your genuinely committed work in Now. Be stingy, a crowded Now is the same as no Now. Everything you are unsure about goes to Later, not Next.
- Fill in Impact, Effort and Customer requests on the Later items, then read the How we prioritize document for how to weigh them against each other
The three horizons
- Now — committed to the current release (v2.0). Dated, owned, in build.
- Next — committed to the following release (v2.1). Scoped, not started.
- Later / Backlog — real candidates, no release, no dates. Say "not yet" here instead of in a meeting.
- Idea intake — raw requests that have not been triaged. Nothing here is a promise.
Horizons answer when roughly. The Release field answers in which build. They are different questions, which is why both exist: a task can move from Next to Now without its release changing, and a slipped release can rewrite dates without anything changing horizon.
The status pipeline
Idea → Scoped → In Progress → In Review → Shipped
Scoped is the important one. It means someone wrote down what "done" is, so engineering can start without another meeting. Anything sitting in Idea with a due date is a lie you are telling yourself.
The fields, and what each is for
| Field | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Release | Which build does this ship in |
| Impact | How much does it move the business |
| Effort | S / M / L / XL, rough not precise |
| Customer requests | How many customers actually asked |
| Source | Where the request came from |
| Needs release note | Will a customer notice this shipped |
The must-have / nice-to-have tags are scope tags, not value tags: they say what gets cut if the release runs out of time. Impact says what the thing is worth. A high-impact nice-to-have is a perfectly normal thing to defer.
The sublists
- v2.0 release scope — everything shipping in this release, wherever it sits in the tree.
- Customer-committed — things a human promised a named customer. Do not quietly drop these.
- Ship checklist (v2.0) — the release-day list. Open it the morning you ship.