ProductPlan's roadmap hierarchy provides a structured approach to organizing and visualizing strategic planning
Overview
The ProductPlan hierarchy helps you create comprehensive, meaningful roadmaps with multiple levels of strategic organization. As a reminder, you should always keep things high level and strategic. Let’s dive into the hierarchy from the top down.
The hierarchical elements from top down include the Strategic Portfolio, Roadmap Portfolio, Roadmap, Lanes, Containers and Bars.
The strategic portfolio represents the highest level of organization in ProductPlan. It encompasses multiple product areas into a singular, comprehensive view of strategic objectives, opportunities and roadmap initiatives. Leadership can use the strategic portfolio to align cross-functional strategies and understand the broader organizational landscape.
You’re able to filter your strategies, save and share the Strategic Portfolio.
A roadmap portfolio is a collection of roadmaps organized into a holistic overview, essentially a mega-roadmap. It allows teams to group related roadmaps and track progress within a particular area of the organization. The roadmap portfolios help managers maintain a focused view of their specific product or departmental strategies.
Roadmap portfolios offer more flexibility in terms of how you approach your lane and legend structure, as well. Standardization at the roadmap level is so important to have comprehensive roadmap portfolios.
A roadmap is a specific strategic plan for a product, feature or initiative (potentially even a team, as well). It generally contains multiple lanes and represents the overall strategic direction for a particular area. Roadmaps can be time-based, such as quarterly or annual plans, or organized around specific themes and objectives.
You have options to display a roadmap in a Gantt-style chart, Kanban-style list or even a table view. Roadmaps are customizable and flexible in terms of the information you want to display and how it’s seen.
Lanes are horizontal sections within a roadmap that group related initiatives or work streams. They help organize and categorize different types of work, making it easier to understand the structure of a roadmap. Lanes can represent departments, strategic themes or sub-products. Lanes provide a clear visual separation of different types of work.
You’ll want to keep your lanes high level and concise. Your containers and bars should clearly map to one lane. Lanes should also operate in conjunction with your legend; they’re two sides of the same coin in terms of visual impact and representation.
The lanes are highlighted in red below.
Containers are a grouping mechanism within a lane that allows for further organization of initiatives. They help create logical clusters of related work items, enabling more granular categorization and visualization of strategic elements. Containers are often compared to epics in other project management systems. They tend to represent longer term work or are centered on a common theme.
Containers can be color-coded, sized and annotated to provide additional context and insights into strategic initiatives. You're able to expand and/or collapse your containers. You're seeing a combination of this below.
Containers are highlighted in red below.
Bars are the individual items representing specific initiatives, projects or work within a roadmap. This is the most granular component of the roadmap. They can live directly on a lane or within a container. Bars can be color-coded, sized and annotated to provide additional context and insights into strategic initiatives.
You’re able to associate objectives, custom fields, opportunities and specific integrations with both bars and containers.
Bars are highlighted in red below.
Best Practices
Start with your strategic portfolio to gain an overview of your organization's initiatives. Use lanes to create clear organizational structures that make your roadmaps easy to understand. Leverage containers for more granular grouping of related work items. Ensure that each bar tells a clear story about your strategic initiative, providing transparency and clarity to all stakeholders.
Utilize standardization as much as possible!