Product managers, what's the hardest thing about creating your roadmap?

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I haven't found a clean way in Jira to keep my roadmap up to date and communicate it with stakeholders - but that's the most important thing in our world. I just keep a living document and update it for the president of the company to keep an eye on. She knows what we're working on, but priorities are ever changing, so things have to move around somewhat frequently.

Jira Portfolio works for this, assuming your backlog is hierarchically structured and rolls up into the the larger items on the Roadmap. It becomes that much more difficult when the roadmap ietm is decomposed across multiple teams within the same product arena though not impossible as organizing and naming conventions are under one groups control. This becomes impossibly difficult when the decompositions spans many teams across different organizational units as now the organizing and naming conventions are not under one group which makes it impossible. When thinking of organizing conventions, this includes the How to represent the What? (Project/Epics/Stories) but also following a shared common cadence in order to establish the strongest signal for progress that can roll up into the roadmap.

As you say "priorities are changing and things move around frequently" - if this is going on at the Roadmap level then worth examining if the abstraction is at a too low level.

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We have backend, multiple clients (desktop, mobile, browser), and management console. Some common issues, some unique. Very hard to break out the dependencies and differences into an overview.

Can anybody on this board who has used JIRA Portfolio successfully reach out to me?

Seems I need some education on how to use this tool in a minimally effective way.

Unbelievable how I cannot simply add existing epics to my newly formed Portfolio board from my Kanban board.

Some how some way four epics were added when originally creating my Portfolio board, and now I cannot add any of the remaining.

Thanks for this. Interesting subject for me.

The thing that I am looking for that I haven't been able to find is defining a Program Increment, that contains Sprints, and then being able to filter things by that PI the same way you do with Sprints. You can do it with releases/fix versions, but then you create issues when you export to a tool like DOMO.

Hey Sam,

That is a very interesting question. My team and I don't use Portfolio for roadmap documentation and tracking. But, to be honest, we didn't give it a shot, so, maybe we are missing out on a better approach than our current one.

We currently depend more on Jira. We have a separate project for Product Planning (we have other projects for engineering). Every idea is added there as a task and it has a life cycle that it goes through. For each card, we assign impact and complexity values to help us decide each quarter what are the things that we should focus on.

I'd love to share with you more details, let me know if you have any questions or if you want to dig deeper.

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For 'all hands on deck', it might be helpful to use both a timeline-based roadmap (Gantt chart) and an agile/iteration roadmap. Ideally, within a single one tool.

Some people respond to the timeline with deadlines, while others may be more productive in the relaxed, agile environment.

BigPicture (that I represent), has both roadmap species and even the third 'in-between' type - quarterly product roadmap. See all three here: https://softwareplant.com/jira-product-roadmap/