How do you balance team capacity across multiple product roadmaps?

Question

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.

Melika-Everview · Answer

Ha, I think a lot of us know that spreadsheet-drowning feeling well!

Honest take on the portfolio tools: Planyway, Smartsheet, and BigPicture are a real step up from spreadsheets for planning — timelines, dependency lines, a capacity view you're not maintaining by hand. So not just spreadsheet-hell in a new coat. But they're mostly planning-time tools, so the thing to check before switching is whether your actual pain is building the plan, or keeping a live read on it as things move. If it's the latter, a Gantt tool can quietly become the same manual upkeep just prettier.

The other filter for your setup specifically: you're across Jira and Asana, and a lot of these tools are single-source. Whatever you evaluate, weight the cross-tool view heavily, otherwise you've just moved the spreadsheet problem up a level.

(This overlaps with the cross-product question you posted separately same underlying thing, really: the planning view and the live-execution view are two different jobs, and most tools do one well.)
Curious what stack others landed on for the multi-tool case specifically that's the part I see teams struggle with most.

Tatsiana Gomolko · Answer

Hm, that's an interesting approach, thank you for sharing your experience.

Joshua Brock _ Seibert Group_ GmbH · Answer

Greetings @Tatsiana Gomolko and welcome to the Community!

It's a good sign that you're asking this before picking a tool, the spreadsheet pain usually isn't a tooling problem so much as a missing allocation model. Before evaluating Planyway, Smartsheet, or Big Picture, it's worth first agreeing on how capacity gets split across your roadmaps (for example, a rough percentage split between committed roadmap work, tech debt, and interrupt work, like another commenter suggested here).

Once that's agreed, almost any portfolio tool becomes more useful, because you're checking reality against a plan instead of trying to solve prioritization and visibility at the same time.

On the "worth the switch" question: it depends on how many of your teams actually live in Jira versus Asana.

Most portfolio-layer tools (including the ones mentioned here) work by reading from Jira as the source of truth and adding a planning view on top. They won't give you a unified view across Jira and Asana unless the Asana work is also synchronized into Jira.

If your organization is moving toward SAFe or already works that way, it's also worth considering Agile Hive. It's built specifically around Program Increment (PI) Planning and Agile Release Train coordination rather than general cross-project roadmapping. It's a different category from the general portfolio tools mentioned above.

* A Program Board that shows cross-team dependencies and capacity at a glance, instead of a spreadsheet that goes stale after planning
* ART and team-level reports comparing planned load vs. available capacity across every team on the train
* A WSJF-prioritized backlog with the full SAFe hierarchy (Epics, Capabilities, Features, Enablers), so cross-product prioritization has a shared, defensible basis
* Roadmaps and vision documentation are linked directly to the backlog teams execute from, instead of a separate slide deck or spreadsheet

You can learn more as well: https://agile-hive.com

The caveat: this is built around the SAFe/ART operating model, so it's a heavier fit if your teams aren't structured that way (or don't want to be). And like the other tools mentioned, it's Jira-native, meaning it won't give you visibility into work that only lives in Asana.

Just in full disclosure, I work at Seibert Group GmbH, the team behind Agile Hive.

Hope this helps, and again, welcome!!

Joshua
Content Writer & US Representative
Agile Hive and Aura Apps (products of Seibert Group GmbH)