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.
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 can also combine views for multiple roadmaps across your products, grouped by
You have options to display a roadmap in a Gantt-style chart or Kanban-style board. 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 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.
Lanes are highlighted in red.
Sub Lanes
Sub lanes are a secondary grouping option that sits between a lane and the roadmap work items. A sublane groups the initiative, epic, and story that roll up to a parent objective lane. It links "why" (the objective) to "what" (the roadmap items).
Sublanes are highlighted in red.
Initiative
Initiatives are the highest-level grouping on a roadmap. It connects delivery work to an Idea and can contain one or more epics. They tend to represent long term work or are centered on a common them. Can be color-coded, sized, and annotated. You are able to expand or collapse your initiatives. They are noted by an asterisk symbol.
An initiative is highlighted in red
Epic
A container for a defined capability or outcome, made up of stories. It can sit inside an initiative when it serves a larger Idea-driven effort, or stand alone for work that doesn't roll up to one. An epic is noted by a lightning bolt symbol.
Story
Stories 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 an epic or initiative. Stories can be color-coded, sized and annotated to provide additional context and insights into strategic initiatives.
Stories are noted by an equal sign symbol.
Stories are highlighted in red below.
Backlog
Your backlog drawer holds every initiative, epic and story for a product, so nothing gets duplicated across roadmaps. You can drag items directly from the backlog drawer onto your roadmap.
