5 Jira Roadmap Tips (+ How to Add Milestones)

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An effective project roadmap keeps stakeholders aligned and helps you see potential roadblocks. But, they are not always easy to create for collaborators or clients.

Luckily, these tips (and tools like Visor) can help you create Jira roadmaps with milestones that make your life easier and drive alignment.

1. Make sure ALL your Jira issues have due dates 

Ensuring all issues (or at least parent issues) have rough due dates is crucial in creating your Jira roadmap.

Providing a rough timeline helps you communicate internally and externally to stakeholders, clarify expectations, and set clear deadlines for your most important deliverables. Setting due dates is one simple habit that help you prioritize, pivot, and change plans as needed.

💡 Visor allows you to add custom fields that live only in Visor. If you want to add public-facing due dates to your projects that don't live in Jira, use Visor's custom date fields alongside the Jira data you import into Visor.

2. Break your main deliverables into Epics

Breaking your main deliverables for a project into epics in Jira helps you set dates and prioritize and enhances the readability of your roadmap. While you may know the intricacies of your project inside and out, external stakeholders need to get a clear grasp of what’s coming and when. Breaking critical parts of your project into Epics allows you to present the “big picture” while leaving room to drill down in the child issues.

💡 Visor allows you to drill drown to the subtask level in your Jira roadmaps. You can also bring in multiple Jira projects into one roadmap with JQL. Add filters to create different views for different audiences (e.g., epics & tasks only).

3. Add color and milestones to your roadmap

Adding some color coding to your roadmap is not only visually pleasing; science has proven that adding color ensures that the information you’re presenting sticks with people.

Adding color also allows you to leave less room for confusion or miscommunication down the line. Milestones also help make project data in a roadmap FAR clearer for stakeholders. 

💡 Visor allow you to color code with the exact RGB colors you want. Format based on issue type, progress status, assignee, and more with just a few clicks. In addition, you can also add milestones to your Jira roadmap.

4. Explore tools that transform your Jira data into a roadmap

Projects are constantly changing and evolving, so your roadmap must be just as flexible as you are. Tools like Visor can use your Jira data to create a roadmap with a few button clicks, saving you time and doing the heavy lifting for you. Visor also communicates with Jira so that any updates you make to your project in Jira sync over to Visor (and vice versa).

You can make your Jira syncing a one-way sync or a two-way sync.

5. Make your roadmap as shareable as possible

It’s hard being the only person with the keys to the kingdom. Presenting your roadmap in a way that is easily shareable not only aids with communication but it can also help take some of the weight off the project manager and prevent roadblocks in the future.

💡 With Visor, you can share your Jira roadmap with whoever you please and set the permissions (e.g., view, edit) that you want them to have. This makes it easy to keep your stakeholders, clients, and collaborators aligned.

No one knows the value of time like people managing complex projects, and your roadmap should feel like an asset instead of a burden. Lighten the lift with Visor and try it for free today!