Step 3.2: Visualize your product roadmap
Airtable
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Airtable
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Guide for product operations
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Visualize your product roadmap
Once all of your project information is in Airtable, it’s time to get it in front of your stakeholders.
There are plenty of options for how you can visualize your roadmap to meet the needs of each one—and since you’ve already done the hard work of pulling all your projects together, this part is a cinch.
Follow along in Airtable.
In this step, we’ll explore this team-level template. Dive deeper into the product operations workflow here.
Create a view for every stakeholder
One option for visualizing your roadmap is creating different views for everyone who needs access. Anyone can create a personal view based on slices of information that are relevant for their own specific needs.
Explore various ways you can view your roadmap for different needs and stakeholders across teams and departments:
1. By product manager
This Grid view groups Projects by Product Manager to make it easy to understand who’s owning what.
2. By status
This Kanban view categorizes Projects by Status to make it easy to visualize which Projects by progress stage.
3. Launch calendar
This calendar view makes it easy to see when specific launches or releases are taking place. Release dates can also be synced to personal calendars via many various calendar integrations.
4. Sprint planning
To manage timelines in more detail, try a timeline view. Here, we’ve grouped by sprint to easily see project allocation and status across each one.
5. Product proposals
Visualizing project ideas in a gallery view can be useful for helping with prioritization exercises. It also helps with easily finding key artifacts such as Product Requirements Documents.
⚡ Pro tip
Shared views let product teams share their roadmaps with other departments—like marketing, so they can plan accordingly, and always have a real-time view into what’s coming. Anyone with the proper permissions can use this shared view, then mix-and-match their own version of the information, or even sync it into their own base. To share your roadmap, simply hit “share view” toward the top right-hand corner of any view.
Define delivery workstreams and gain insights
Resources, team commitments, or unforeseen circumstances can interfere with project timelines. It happens! That’s why it’s important to create a system that’s flexible enough to let you change dates and details as the need arises.
Consider adding a “Resource Planning” view section so views on resource planning are easily accessible. The timeline view is a valuable resource here in visualizing how your team’s work is unfolding over time. You can use it to see when resources are busy or free and thereby assign work, as well as lay out product roadmaps and visualize different phases of projects over time.
1. Design assignments
This timeline view groups projects into swimlanes by product manager or DRI to visualize when team members may be under or over capacity at different points in time. Different views of this information are often customized by other roles (for example, by Designer).
2. Design effort
This kanban view stacks projects by design effort to aid in resource estimation for product designers. Different views of this information can be customized for other resource estimation needs (for example, Engineering effort).
Visualize your team’s workload
A clear grasp of how your resources are being allocated is critical to your product launch’s success. A workload imbalance, for example, should be caught and fixed as early as possible to help prevent milestones becoming blocked as you near your launch date.
Apps are a perfect way to visualize your project resources and glean insights from Airtable. The chart app, in particular, makes it easy to see which team members are assigned to which projects. Because of its ability to show grouped data, you can slice your data in a chart by priority, projected effort, status, and more.
Break projects into tasks
When planning projects and timelines, it’s important to connect your work with the other systems the engineering team might be using. One of the most common use cases is in associating Jira user stories/tasks for each feature or project. (This is covered in more depth in Stage 4.)
Our Jira integration enables syncing if teams want to use Airtable for things like setting estimates and tracking individual work items. Sync tasks from Jira into a new “Tasks” table, which can be associated with specific Projects / Features in Airtable as linked records.
Mix and match the tips above to make sure everyone on your team has the right visibility into your roadmap. And if you want to take it to the next level, check out the next step for tips on centralizing your roadmap organization-wide.
