Introducing Advanced Roadmaps

[#1]

tl;dr Today we are super excited to announce Advanced Roadmaps for Jira Software Premium. If you’re already a Jira Software Cloud customer, you can test drive Advanced Roadmaps 1 month for free by starting a trial of Jira Software Premium (go to billing → manage subscriptions → change plans). Get the full story below. If you’d like to join us for a live demo and Q&A, join our webinar on 5/21 (5/22 in EMEA and APAC).

18 months ago we launched roadmaps in Jira Software Cloud next-gen projects. The feature has been a hit, becoming one of our fastest adopted features of all time. Since then, we’ve received a lot of passionate feedback from customers on how we should evolve our roadmaps offering. If you’ve been following the evolution of our roadmaps feature, you’ve seen continuous enhancements ever since it launched in response to feedback from you, our customers. In that time, two key themes have emerged on what you wanted to see from us next.

The first theme is that people want roadmaps in classic projects. For this, we’re excited to share we’re bringing the next-gen roadmap directly into classic projects. This means that every single team working in Jira Software Cloud will get access to a powerful basic roadmap. More details to come on that in the next couple months.

The second theme is some organisations need more powerful planning capabilities, like the ability to build roadmaps that span across several teams and projects. Today we’re excited to be announcing Advanced Roadmaps in Jira Software Cloud Premium. For Advanced Roadmaps, we’ve taken our product previously known as Portfolio for Jira, redesigned it from the ground up and rebranded it to align with our product vision. Advanced Roadmaps will help you deliver products faster and more reliably by building smarter plans at both a team and cross-team level. If you’re curious to understand how the new experience is different you can learn more here.

So what’s included in Advanced Roadmaps that can help you take planning to the next level?

Multi-team & organization-level roadmapping: With Advanced Roadmaps you can build your roadmap based off of work from as many Jira boards, projects, and filters as you need. While Advanced Roadmaps will work for a single team, it is particularly well-suited to representing larger pieces of work because it enables you to create additional levels of hierarchy (as many as you need) above the Epic level. So for example, you could map epics from a dozen different teams or Jira projects to a single feature.

Multi-team & organization-level dependency tracking: You can track and visualise dependencies across all of the work in your roadmap, which can be really helpful in accounting for issues that can come up and blockers across your business. The Advanced Roadmap is specifically designed in a way to deal with the number of dependencies across a large body of work.

Multiple scenario planning: Plans change and there’s almost always more than one path to getting your project over the line. With Advanced Roadmaps you can build different versions of a plan, in order to account for things like the best and worst case scenarios or different strategic options that are available for your organization.

Capacity planning: Advanced Roadmaps helps you account for your team’s capacity in your plans so you know if you have to reduce the scope of your project, reallocate resources, or adjust your due dates. Based on how teams estimate their work, and how fast they work, every team gets visibility into whether they’re taking on too much work in a specific sprint or whether they can potentially take on more. Because dependencies are also accounted for in your plan, you can easily identify work that might be at risk (for example if another piece of work is dependent on a team that is over their capacity), which can help you fix potential problems before they arise.

Communications at all levels of your organization: Easily share a live version of your roadmap tailored to your specific audience. For example, if you’re sharing your roadmap with an executive team, you may want to show work and progress at the highest level (for example here’s what a dozen teams are working on and how they’re making progress). And with other stakeholders you may want to show how epics and stories are progressing. No matter who you’re sharing with, it’s easy to filter your roadmap to the right view. You can share via Confluence or with a link to your roadmap.

What’s coming in the future?

As I mentioned earlier in the post, we also have a basic roadmap in next-gen (which will soon be available in classic projects). Today the Advanced Roadmap and basic roadmap are two different solutions, designed to solve problems at different levels of your organization (at the team level and cross-team level). In the coming year you can look forward to more harmonization between these two experiences. We’ll also be looking for ways to improve the way people share their roadmaps.

If you’re interested, take Advanced Roadmaps for a test spin! We’d love to hear your feedback. If you’re already a Jira Software Cloud customer, you can trial Advanced Roadmaps 1 month for free by starting a trial of Jira Software Premium (go to billing → manage subscriptions → change plans). If you're new to Jira, you can learn more about roadmaps in Jira Software here. If you’d like to join us for a live demo and Q&A, join our webinar on 5/21 (5/22 in EMEA and APAC).

[Drew Heasman]

Just wanted to comment so that people are aware, Jira has a free implementation of Roadmaps (minus the advanced features) - available for the Next Gen and Classic projects.

There should be no need to pay extra for basic roadmaps.

[Josh Frank]

@Drew_Heasman That's right that we have basic roadmaps available in next-gen projects today. One thing to clarify is basic roadmaps is not available yet on classic projects (it's coming soon). Next-gen roadmaps is optimized to help individual teams with planning and Advanced Roadmaps is optimized for cross-team planning (although it can work perfectly well for individual teams as well). Check out our new Jira Software roadmaps page comparing the two roadmap offerings side by side.  

[Jan Stähle]

Great news - do I have to activate this feature or is it automatically "switched on" in a Jira Cloud Premium subscription? 
Is Advanced Roadmaps available for Classic Projects as well already?

[Tal Levi]

Double in price just for roadmaps? In what world does it make sense?

[Alberto Yufra]

Hi, is the Advanced Roadmap feature available for Classic Projects?

[ensemblebd]

Out of curiosity, will this new purchasable monthly fee product "remember" the user's choice of excluding Done items?
Or is that still an unreported issue that everyone deals with, having to click every time you load the page to hide items completed weeks, months, ago. 

I can't imagine giving a client a link to this, and then explaining to them that they must hide unrelated items from the project history.

Pretty nifty though, I like it! +1 like for you

[Writam]

Good to see you guys are upgrading the roadmaps.

Can't wait for the roadmaps on classic projects though. Most of our team runs on hourly estimates and planning. @Josh Frank - is there an issue that I could watch to stay updated? Wondering where this is in the priority list

[Brandon Fish]

@Tal Levi It doesn't.  There just isn't enough value in Premium to justify the expense (for us). I think they are just trying to sweeten the product a little with something extra even though it should be in the base product.

As my users are making choices between different alternatives, it's becoming harder and harder to evangelize Atlassian products.  My answers are generally "No, it doesn't do that out of the box.  We could look at <third party add-on> but with the number of users in our workspace, it probably won't justify the added expense."

[John Achury]

This paid version of Advanced Roadmaps are or are not in classic projects?

[Deleted user]

[redacted]

[André Pedralho]

For those interested on having basic roadmaps in classic projects for free, vote here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-17214

[John Kaczala]

Possibly a silly question, but how do I know if I'm on a next-gen project?

I'm a relatively new Jira user and inherited an instance of Jira Cloud from my predecessor but don't know a whole lot about what's under the covers.

I'd like to consider replacing the EasyAgile roadmap plugin with Jira's native roadmapping tool and will be evaluating this soon.

[John Achury]

How do I do for the installation? please help

[Mark Bretl]

Almost all of our newer projects are next-gen and would be awesome to have them all on the 'same' roadmap. When I try to add a next-gen project to an Advanced Roadmap plan, I get the following message:

"Advanced Roadmaps doesn't support next-gen projects."

Hope we don't have to wait too long for Advanced Roadmaps for next-gen projects...

--Mark

[Roei Soudai]

I must tell you that I prefer to move to A-ha then pay twice for roadmap capabilities.
try first to give us basic features like accumulation information without add-ons
exporting to PDF in a good way without paying to add-ons...
very greedy from my point of view

[Jono]

I've been hanging out for the Roadmaps tool! but at double, the price (In my case $2k per month) isn't worth it. I'm now just very disappointed..... Atlassian, you need to realize your pricing model stop the uptake of these features.  

[Yamen Hawit]

Yay, was waiting for this one! 

[Josh Frank]

@Jan Stähle - You can find the new features under the "plans" tab when you're on Jira Software Cloud Premium. Currently Advanced Roadmaps only works with classic projects. 

@John Achury @Alberto Yufra Advanced Roadmaps is built to work with classic projects. For tips on getting started check out our documentation. 

@John KaczalaYou can see which types of project you're using by going to view all your projects and then on your project list you'll see a project type. It should show either next-gen or classic. 

@Mark Bretl Thanks for surfacing that feedback around Advanced Roadmaps + next-gen. We're currently exploring how we can support next-gen projects with Advanced Roadmaps.

@Roei Soudai @ian @Brandon Fish @Tal Levi Thank you for sharing your feedback. We're listening. 

[Maksim.Feshchanka]

@ Atlassian team,

Could you please provide any timing of when this feature will be available for the Classic projects for "non-Premium" users? Since JSWCLOUD-17214 doesn't have this info.

Thank you!

--Maksim

[Deleted user]

I fully agree with Jono. Atlassian's pricing model needs refactoring. As an example, we could add a simple plugin that extends SQL queries, but doing so adds a cost to all 200+ of our users. I see how this benefits Atlassian, but how does that benefit my team when one or two of us use the plugin? Also, how does this inspire me to want to try out new extensions and support all the hard working developers, trying to make the Atlassian ecosystem better? To be honest with you, I stopped browsing the marketplace long ago because we simply can't afford to give anything a shot due to Atlassian's billing practices. Adding a new feature that results in twice as expensive a bill is outrageous — and particularly questionable given the reality of COVID on businesses. Seriously… Why continue to bill like this? How did it ever make sense? If you bill for things that people engage with, it will make this platform such a better experience for everybody involved.

Thanks for your consideration!

[Emilio Silvas]

I have to agree with others that doubling my price point just to get roadmaps on our instance is going to meet with a resounding "no". We only have classic projects and waiting to get roadmaps has not endeared me to more waiting.

Still, having our project sprint planning in a single location along with our roadmap has been a goal.

However, at this point, our options are 1) wait for the eventual release of roadmaps for classic projects or 2) use other software to manage the roadmap.

We chose #2 and currently use Aha. I would strongly consider Jira roadmaps if it could all be under one roof. But not a double the price and not if we have to wait many months to even use it.

We still love Jira for sprint planning. But this will prevent us from ever using the roadmap features.

[Tal Levi]

@Josh Frank I do apologize if it came out harsh, but even if it's the best roadmap feature out there, we won't pay that much, and it seems we're not the only ones.

It's a feature that would be useful for us, but not at this price when there are many alternatives available. @Brandon Fish summarised it very well - there are already a lot of needed features that you're not developing, which requires us to purchase at the marketplace, or acquire as a different product (such as Confluence), while your competitors out there are doing the opposite and giving a much simpler, useful, all-in-one solution that's the same price as the standard Jira plan alone, or even less.

Best example would be Notion - Task management, roadmapping, databases, documentation, etc - all in one. With Atlasssian we need to purchase everything separately. Yes you do have a much more powerful platform, but honestly users now a day are looking for simple solutions, that don't require them to go purchase. You're not the only ones in the game anyone - and this is coming from the only person at their company that actually supports keeping Jira and not moving to a different tool (honest). 

Anyways, good luck with the roll-out! I do understand it's all about business, and if the majority is willing to pay, I guess it's all the justification you need - but I doubt it's the majority :) 

[Paul Morel]

As @Tal Levi articulated above, I think this is a great addition but forcing an upgrade to Premium for all users sadly confirms it's time to look for an alternative to Jira because nothing innovative will be added to the standard plan.  It has had a good run but Jira is neither a price leader nor an innovation leader at this point.  Frustrating...

[Jeremy West]

Its becoming increasingly apparent Atlassian's pricing model and feature delivery model are severely broken and disconnected from user requirement. Adding basic features that should already exist in the platform and only making them available to 'Premium' subscribers when the base cost of the platform already far exceeds its value is getting to be beyond a joke.

We have commenced actively looking for alternate solutions, Atlassian is completely ignoring any direct feedback from their customers on any channel and blindly pushing ahead with this new premium model to extort more funds out of their customers. I miss the days when Atlassian valued their customers with their no bullsh*t approach (as per their values), now we are just left with a pile of expensive bullsh*t.

[Bjoern Veith]

Awesome, I really look forward to integrate it into our portfolio  (small sidekick) as a solution partner. But I found already a glitch. The german translations is quite weird. Even I use jira always in english, our clients still prefer the german language pack. So I propose this needs to be improved.  if you guys need a helping hand to improve the german language pack, just reach out to us. We're happy to support you guys with vocabulary which will be accepted by the german speaking customers. 

cheers