How to Build a Perfect Jira Roadmap

A project roadmap is a bridge between short-term efforts and long-term business goals. This instrument is widely used for planning the development of new features and their releases as well as for tracking status changes and other updates.

Understanding the value of a roadmap and implementing one in your project is key for keeping all your team headed in the same direction. In this article, we’re exploring the roadmap approach to Jira planning, identifying its values, and figuring out the best way to build the project roadmap.

What is a roadmap?

A project roadmap is a great source of information outlining planning, goals, priorities, and progress made over time. It’s a graphical, high-level action plan that aligns your team and other stakeholders around your goals and maps out necessary steps to achieve them.

Unlike the project plan, where details usually prevail, the roadmap stays simple and concentrates only on essentials. That’s exactly what makes a roadmap so valuable for managing expectations, communicating plans, and coordinating resources with other teams.

How to create a roadmap in Jira?

Today there are multiple ways to implement a roadmap for Jira boards. There are several solutions developed by Jira itself as well as multiple add-ons to get this functionality. However, no matter what you eventually choose, all roadmap tools for Jira are based on the same key concepts:

Theme: This is your high-level strategic objective.

Epic: A large work item that can be broken down into a number of smaller tasks — user stories.

User story: Feature requirement written from the perspective of an end-user.

Start and due dates: Adding start and end dates to epics, user stories, etc. makes it possible to visualize them on the timeline.

When creating a roadmap, we recommend you focus on the following principles to keep your workflow clear and manageable:

• Ensure everyone has access to it
• Add only important information
• Keep it well-structured
• Focus both on short-term and long-term goals
• Regularly review your roadmap to adjust to changes
• Align with stakeholders at all levels

Best Jira roadmap plugins

Now let’s see the Jira roadmap plugins you can find on the Atlassian marketplace to build your own product roadmap. All of these apps have their pros and cons, so let’s check what you can get from each of them:

Planyway

Planyway app is a very flexible roadmapping solution that lets you visualize projects from many angles. Apart from a basic Gantt-like roadmap, you can group it by team members and projects.

Team roadmap lets you visualize the plan by team members which is especially useful in terms of workload management. You can easily check who’s responsible for what and how your team is doing with the tasks assigned to them.

When managing multiple projects, you may also add several Jira projects to a single view to see issues together and even split the roadmap by projects that allows you to work with the project portfolio.

There is another feature that is used to adapt the roadmap to your workflow — scales. Just by a single click, you can transform the roadmap from a daily to a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or event annual view.

For those who are looking for a way to represent the hierarchy of tasks, it’s good to know that you can visualize subtasks along with Jira issues. Once you set dates to a subtask, it shows up on the roadmap.

Milestones may also come in handy if you wish to make key dates more recognizable.

Except for the Jira roadmap features, the app might be useful for those looking for other solutions in Jira, like time tracking and workload management as Planyway covers them together all under the same price.

Easy Agile Roadmaps

Easy Agile is the app that solely focuses on creating roadmaps to make teams able to align around the project vision and understand where the project is heading. Apart from a regular project visualization, it allows its users to group issues into high-level streams of work that represent different teams or customer outcomes.

Another useful perk is that progress tracking based on epic statistics is available just by hovering the epic’s progress line.

Swanly

Swanly was created with the idea of clear data visualization across projects reached through roadmaps and dashboards. The tool gets access to all Jira projects and is able to provide you with a portfolio issue roadmap to view any issue from any project, a project release roadmap to centralize releases and create cross-project releases with sync versions.

Along with the roadmaps, Swanly can show data in the list view to see high-level data like name, status, type, progress, description, and start & end dates in one place. Reporting is another plus that lets you have insights into each of your releases. You get access to all details needed including the scope progress, time or story point progress, burndown chart, and lots more.

Agile User Story Map & Product Roadmap

This Jira roadmap planner is a bogof that unites two big views — a user story map and a product roadmap that lets you see a big picture from a user's perspective. It’s possible to keep working in the no-swimlane mode or split your story map into release and sprint swimlanes. The same can be done for the roadmap, so you’ll have the release and sprint timeline.

The app grants easy navigation thanks to filtering issues to display only what’s needed as well as data export to share your workflow with stakeholders.

Epic Roadmap

This add-on lets you manage and visualize the team’s epics on a timeline. You can easily manipulate the epic boards, display statuses, and filter them. Additionally, you may link them with dependencies between epics as well as bring more clarity by visualizing milestones, version, and sprint date markers.

Live Roadmap

Live Roadmap is a great choice if you want to get instant insights into how your projects are progressing. The tool allows you to connect with Jira data and not only visualize the planning but also view roadmap issues planned against real tracked time and budget taken from Jira. What’s more, you can create a project portfolio and highlight key dates with milestones to keep everyone in sync.

Why do you need a roadmap in Jira?

When you set up a project in Jira, the chance you have many variables to keep track of is high. And while managing everything just with the means of Jira boards seems too overwhelming, a visual project roadmap grants you an illustration of your workflow over time which can help you:

Keep everyone focused on the same goals

As the roadmap is a pure visualization of the work to be done to achieve your goals and objectives, it can pass this idea to the whole team making it clear why they do what they do and what they need to reach by the end of their path. Also, it serves as a reminder of all important deadlines that increase the changes to deliver expected results on time.

Identify task priority

The roadmap is a great instrument for representing task priority. By simply checking the roadmap timeline, all team members instantly get which tasks are more prioritized than the others and demand the most attention which helps you spend less time on coordination and make sure that everything goes by plan.

Communicate with stakeholders

As a roadmap visualizes your high-level project plan, you can make use of it for demonstration in front of other stakeholders. With a clear representation of your work plan, they can easily understand the execution process, form their expectations just by having a look at only the most important project milestones without diving into unnecessary details.

Adapt to changes

Having a roadmap in front of you will help stay focused on your initial goals and objectives in case some changes happen along the way. So, it becomes sort of a compass holding your team on course.

Visualize status updates

Because the roadmap timeline is dynamic and reflects all updates happening, you may use it as a source of information when tracking how work is progressing from stage to stage.

Final thoughts

In this article, we tried to explore the basics and give you a general understanding of what the Jira product roadmap is and how to implement it in Jira. The Jira roadmap is an awesome approach to getting an easy-to-understand picture of the project pipeline and can become a great source of information in a wide range of cases — when setting priorities for your team, outlining your plans for executives, presenting work results to your clients. So, if you haven’t tried it yet, it’s time to give it a try.