How do you balance team capacity across multiple product roadmaps?

[Tatsiana Gomolko]

Quick question for the fellow PMs: how are you handling cross-product roadmapping and capacity planning? We're drowning in spreadsheets trying to get visibility across our teams in Jira and Asana.

Are those 'portfolio' tools (like Planyway/Smartsheet/Big Picture) worth the switch, or is that just a different flavor of spreadsheet hell? Really keen to hear what your real-world setups look like.

[Mary from Planyway]

Someone summoned us? :)

Hi Tatsiana,

Actually, this is exactly the type of problem we built Planyway to solve. Many teams reach a point where spreadsheets stop scaling for cross-product roadmapping and capacity planning, but they also don’t want to replace Jira or move their execution elsewhere.

With Planyway, you can keep Jira as the source of truth while adding a planning layer on top. You can bring work from multiple projects into one Timeline, Table, or Calendar view, visualize roadmaps, track dependencies, and see how work is distributed across teams.

For capacity planning, the Workload view helps you understand who is assigned to what, identify overloaded team members, and make trade-offs before committing to new initiatives. You can also use the Workload Report to compare scheduled work vs. capacity for any period.

The main difference from another spreadsheet is that everything stays connected to your actual tasks — updates in Jira are reflected in your planning views automatically, so you’re not maintaining a separate planning system manually.

[Svitlana Samotis _Reliex_]

Hi Tatsiana, 

I do think these tools can help, especially once you reach the point where keeping roadmaps and capacity aligned in spreadsheets becomes a job of its own.

The real value for me is not just having another roadmap view, but being able to see whether your teams actually have the capacity to deliver what’s planned. 

Since you’re exploring different tools, ActivityTimeline could also be worth a look. I’m part of the team behind it. It brings planning, workload, and capacity together, so you can see work across projects and teams alongside people’s actual availability.

If Jira is your main source of truth, it might be worth adding it to the tools you’re evaluating and testing it with one of your real cross-team planning scenarios.

[zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_]

If every product roadmap competes equally for the same engineering team, no tool can solve the prioritization problem. We found it helpful to agree on capacity allocation first (for example: 60% roadmap initiatives, 20% tech debt, 20% support/interrupt work), then use the portfolio tool to visualize whether reality matches that plan.

Once those guardrails are in place, Jira (with or without a portfolio app) becomes much more useful because you're planning within agreed constraints instead of trying to optimize everything at once.