Getting Started with Your Roadmap

A Comprehensive Guide to Craft’s Product Roadmap Tool.

Maayan Ayalon avatar
Written by Maayan Ayalon
Updated over a week ago

Product roadmaps today are filled with challenges and obstacles – from properly estimating scope and time to ensuring that all teams involved understand and work towards a common goal.

Craft’s Roadmap tool puts all of these pieces together and more by letting you gain a long-term view of all of your product planning in one place – systematically setting a vision and goals, initiatives and milestones so that everyone is aligned for success.

The Product Roadmap View supports planning using OKRs, 6/6/6, Dateless, GIST or customized preferences, aiming for a high-level, long-term product plan.

Product Roadmap Hierarchy

The Product Roadmap starts off with a Release -> Goal -> Initiative hierarchy; however, you can change this terminology in your product settings at any time. These hierarchy components are described below.

  • Releases: High-level entities that contain Objectives and Key Results. These can be named as releases or simply as a title for everything in it (i.e., “MVP” or “Release 3.1” or “Q1”). You can easily set the color of this using the ‘3-dots’ option in the left menu.

  • Objectives: Generally these are KPI-driven objectives which you can measure and benchmark later; for example, “Reach one million active monthly users”.

  • Key Results: Actions you want to take to achieve your goals; for example, “Develop a referral program”.

  • Features: Product Features are linked to this hierarchy by assigning to initiatives.

Click the New button or Double click anywhere to add a new Release to your Roadmap.  

Product Roadmap Views

The Product Roadmap consists of two layouts: the Roadmap View and the Releases View. These are detailed below.w

Roadmap Timeline View

This is the default view, which displays the breakdown of your product releases and milestones on a yearly timeline scale. When in the roadmap view, you can also choose to see more than one Workspace.
Note: that while in multi-workspace view, the roadmap is view only. 

You can take a close look at a specific Release by single clicking on the Release name. Choose to edit the Release name, description, color, statistics or assign new Objectives, Key results and Features from within the menu. 

While in the Roadmap view, you can drag and drop releases into a different position, row or lane. You can also drag and drop objectives and key results inside and between release containers.

For any release container, drag and drop its box borders to resize its appearance, or drag and drop its “diamond” edge to set its actual duration.

Settings

Use Settings to set your roadmap start and end dates or to switch on/off dateless mode. Craft.io will remember your preferences and load them in your next visit.

View Options

The following view options are available at the top of the Product Roadmap screen.

  • Summary: a perfect view for a high level summary of a complex Product Roadmap where just the release name is visible

  • Strategic: key the team focused on the strategic picture with a view that shows the Release name, Objectives and Key results. 

  • Features: a detailed view which shows the Features you plan to build within a release. Toggle to show a higher level view by switching the view to Sections. 

Adding Lanes

Craft allows for powerful organization of your roadmap with lanes. You can create as many lanes as you want to set your release containers apart and give them more meaningful categorization. For example, you might want to name your lanes as “Infrastructure”, “Marketing Campaigns” or “Front End Development”. You can add a new lane from the New button at the top right side. 

Adding Milestones

Milestones are a lightweight entity that you can add at the top of each lane or from the New button. They consist of a name and a date (when the dateless setting is off). For example, a milestone can be a meaningful company event, or a conference that you are going to attend.

To add a milestone, roll your mouse over the upper lane line and click the location where you want to add your milestone or use the New button.

Release Summary View

In the Release Summary view, you can see a side-by-side, detailed view of your product releases per lane, including release statistics, features list and milestones. You can also filter the list of objectives, key results and features by clicking to expand that section.

Assign Features to a Release

Features can be assigned to a release by clicking on a Release and navigating to Assign Feature. Select from existing releases, or hover on a specific Section to expose the + option which allows you to create a new Feature. Once selected, click assign to fix that Feature to the release. 

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