Work management
Roadmap
Initiatives and releases on a time axis, with the sprint cadence drawn behind them.
The roadmap draws the things somebody committed to a date: an initiative running to a quarter, a release with a target, and the sprint windows underneath so a target can be read against the sprint it falls in.
Not a Gantt of work items
Two hundred bars is a picture nobody reads. Item-level dates already have the timeline layout on the board and the backlog; the roadmap answers a different question, at the grain a roadmap is actually read at.
Nothing is placed on a date it does not have
Anything without dates is listed beneath the chart rather than stacked into *now*. Every competitor's roadmap will happily draw undated work at an invented position, and the resulting picture is believed — it looks exactly like a plan.
What the bars mean
| Shape | Means |
|---|---|
| A solid bar | A span somebody set: a start and a target. |
| A diamond | A single date. A milestone or release has one date, and stretching it into a bar would state a duration nobody agreed to. |
| A dashed bar | A span DERIVED from the releases inside it, because the initiative has no dates of its own. An observation, not a commitment — and labelled as one. |
| A filled portion | Progress, by points where anything is estimated and by count otherwise. |
| No percentage | Nothing is attached. An empty bucket is unmeasured rather than 0% done, and a bar drawn empty would say the work has not started. |
Where a release is drawn
On the date it actually shipped, where it has shipped, rather than the date it was aimed at. A release that went out three weeks late and is drawn on its original target is the picture that makes dates meaningless.
Scoping to a team
The roadmap opens on every team, because initiatives cross teams by design. Choosing a team narrows it to the initiatives and releases whose work that team's projects are doing — derived from the work, never declared, so the list can never disagree with it.
Something with no work attached yet shows on every scope rather than none. It belongs to nobody, so dropping it would make a release nobody has put work against invisible on the team roadmaps and visible only on the organisation one — the opposite of who needs to see it.