Guide: Creating a Leadership Roadmap

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Different stakeholders need different roadmaps. While your engineering team needs operational details, your leadership team cares about strategic alignment, investment areas, and capacity.

This guide helps you set up a Leadership Roadmap in Jira Product Discovery. Use this view to communicate the "30,000-foot view", demonstrating how work aligns with business goals without getting lost in delivery status or details.

How to configure a leadership roadmap

A good roadmap frames the conversation around what’s important for your stakeholders: what are their goals? What outcomes are they trying to accomplish? 

Step 1: create fields 

You need specific fields to tell a strategic story. Ensure the following fields are set up in your space:

• Theme / Objective (select): Group ideas by strategic drivers
• Roadmap (select field): Communicates when (eg Q1, Q2 or Now, Next, Later
  • Alternative: use date field for quarterly time-horizons
• Impact (rating field): impact towards goal
  • Alternative: use numeric field for absolute impact
• Effort: A high-level proxy for cost/resources.
• Short description to communicate each idea

Recommended: Add Team (Select)if your roadmap spans multiple product teams.

Step 2: create & configure the 'Board' view 

Once your fields are ready, build the visualization:

• Create a board view, organize the columns by theme 
• Click on 'Fields' to add fields to the cards 
• Click on Layout button next to fields > Detailed

Step 3: apply filters 

Apply filters to filter out noise and only show items that leadership needs to discuss.

Quick tips

• Focus on the "Why": Hide operational fields like "Assignee." Keep the focus strictly on strategic value and alignment.

• Use the Share > Publish feature to generate a read-only link for stakeholders. It stays up-to-date automatically as your plans change.

• Ensure every card has a plain-language description so stakeholders don't have to click into an idea to understand what it is.

Learn more roadmapping best practices here

See a Leadership Roadmap in action

Not sure where to start? Create a dedicated space with pre-built views to explore a real-life example of a leadership roadmap.

Note:

• Only Site/Org Admins and users with permission to create spaces can access this feature.

• If you do not have these permissions, please ask your admin to create the space and invite you.