How to Create Roadmap in Jira + Best Practices

As a project manager, you understand the significance of planning, managing, and communicating your project’s progress using Jira. One of the most effective methods to achieve this is by crafting a Jira roadmap, which provides your team and stakeholders with a Jira big-picture overview of your near-term or long-term initiatives.

In this blog post, we’ll present a detailed Jira roadmap tutorial on creating, customizing, and managing roadmaps, along with sharing best practices to help you use them to maximum effect.

What Is a Jira Roadmap?

A Jira roadmap is a high-level visual representation of your project’s timeline, goals, and key milestones. It’s like having a birds-eye view of where your team is headed and what they need to accomplish along the way. Whether you’re managing a single project or an entire portfolio, a well-crafted Jira product roadmap can be a useful tool for keeping everyone aligned and on track. Both team-managed and company-managed projects are supported in the Jira roadmap view.

Main Components of the Jira Roadmap

A Jira roadmap consists of the key initiatives, epics, and stories that make up your project. You can arrange these elements on a timeline to get a sense of how they all fit together and the dependencies between them. Roadmaps also typically include high-level release dates, key milestones, and other pertinent metadata to give stakeholders a comprehensive snapshot of the work.

Basic Roadmaps (Timelines) vs Advanced Roadmaps in Jira

While Basic Jira roadmaps (Timelines) provide a solid foundation, Jira also offers more advanced roadmapping capabilities. Advanced roadmaps provide a robust suite of features tailored for intricate planning scenarios.

With capabilities such as hierarchy management (adding hierarchy levels above epics), Jira timeline views (allowing you to view tasks from multiple teams and projects), and scenario planning (identifying dependencies and blockers across teams and projects), you gain enhanced flexibility and control over your project’s planning process. Additionally, Advanced roadmaps include the ability to create multiple versions of the roadmap in Jira.

Note: Advanced roadmaps are available with Jira Premium and Enterprise plans. Timelines, while simpler in nature, still provide essential planning tools for smaller teams or less complex projects. Ultimately, the choice between Advanced roadmaps and Timelines depends on the specific needs and scale of your project.

Why Use Jira Roadmaps?

• Visibility and alignment: Jira roadmaps offer a high-level, visual overview of your project’s timeline, goals, and key milestones. This helps keep your entire team and stakeholders aligned on the big picture.
• Planning and prioritization: Roadmaps enable you to plan out your initiatives, epics, and stories on a timeline. This makes it easier to prioritize work, identify dependencies, and optimize your project delivery.
• Tracking progress: Jira roadmaps simplify tracking the progress of your project over time. You can quickly see what’s on schedule and what’s at risk, and identify potential bottlenecks.
• Communication and reporting: Roadmaps serve as a communication tool, allowing you to share your project’s status and plans with stakeholders in a clear, visual format. This supports better decision-making.
• Portfolio management: For companies managing multiple projects, Jira roadmaps provide portfolio-level visibility. This helps leadership make informed decisions about resource allocation and project prioritization.
• Forecasting: Roadmaps help in forecasting future projects and initiatives based on the current pipeline and capacity. This supports long-term strategic planning.

How to Create a Jira Roadmap?

1. Enable the roadmap functionality. Ensure that the Roadmaps feature is enabled in your project settings. For team-managed projects, navigate to Project settings → Features and enable Timeline. In company-managed projects, go to your board, click on •••, then proceed to Board Settings → Timeline and enable the feature.
2. Identify initiatives and epics. Create a new Jira Software project or select an existing one. Navigate to the sidebar and click on the Timeline option. Start by defining the high-level initiatives and epics that make up your project by clicking on +Create Epic.
   
   Name the epic and customize it by adding necessary information such as start and end date, assignee, attachments, and more. Additionally, you can add child issues to your epic by clicking + next to the epic name. These will serve as the building blocks of your roadmap.
3. In Advanced roadmaps, you can add important milestones, releases, and other significant events to your roadmap. This provides helpful context for stakeholders. Also, establish dependencies between tasks to visualize their interrelationships and ensure sequential execution.
4. Use search and filters to view and manage work. Refine your roadmap by searching for keywords and filtering by assignee, timeframe, status, label, priority, versions, or custom fields. Filters apply to all parent and child issues in your Jira timeline view.

How to Customize Roadmaps in Jira?

• Timeline configuration: Adjust the timeline view to display the desired timeframe, whether it’s weeks, months, or quarters. You can zoom in or out to focus on specific time intervals.
• Filtering: Apply filters to refine the roadmap display based on criteria such as assignees, labels, epics, or statuses. Filtering allows you to focus on specific aspects of your project or team workload, making it easier to identify relevant information.
• Column configuration: Customize the columns displayed on the roadmap to show relevant information. You can add, remove, or reorder columns to align with your project’s workflow and priorities.
• Grouping and sorting: Group and sort issues on the roadmap to organize them hierarchically or based on specific criteria. You can group issues by epic, assignee, priority, or any other field to provide a structured view of your project’s tasks and initiatives.
• Color coding: Use color coding to visually differentiate items on the roadmap based on attributes such as priority, status, or issue type. Color coding helps highlight important information and improve visual clarity.
• Saved views: Save your customizations to preserve your preferred roadmap configuration for future use. Saved views allow you to quickly access and apply your preferred settings without having to reconfigure the roadmap each time. Available in Advanced Roadmaps.

How to Share Jira Roadmaps?

Sharing Jira roadmaps is essential for keeping all stakeholders informed and aligned with project progress and priorities.

Basic roadmaps (Timelines) can be shared with specific individuals or teams by configuring settings in the Share section. Additionally, you can copy the link and embed it in other Atlassian products such as Confluence. Furthermore, it’s possible to export a roadmap image (in PNG format) with a specific time view (weeks, months, quarters) and time period using the Export feature.

Advanced roadmaps offer various sharing options in the Share as section:

• Link: Use the link to share the roadmap. Anyone with access to the roadmap will be able to view it, but it will be read-only and not editable.
• Embed: Utilize the iframe code to embed the roadmap within external platforms.
• Confluence: Generate and copy the link, then insert the macro in your Confluence page and paste the link into the Confluence URL field.
• CSV: Create a spreadsheet from your roadmap that can be opened with programs like Excel. This option allows you to export issues currently visible in your roadmap.

Apps to Manage Jira Roadmaps

When it comes to enhancing and customizing roadmapping capabilities in Jira, there are various apps and integrations available. Planyway is a popular option, offering planning, management, and tracking options to provide a more comprehensive roadmapping experience.

Swanly is another app that integrates with Jira, focusing on creating portfolio roadmaps, easy-to-grasp reports, and releases, including cross-project release reports. 

For those seeking an Agile-focused roadmapping approach, Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira provides solutions for building a visual roadmap timeline of your Jira issues. It also allows for exporting roadmaps to PDF for flexibility in sharing updates with stakeholders.

By leveraging these specialized apps alongside Jira’s native roadmapping tools, you can create a project management ecosystem that aligns with your unique workflow and needs.

Best Practices for Roadmaps in Jira

• Keep it high-level: Roadmaps are meant to provide a strategic view. Structure your roadmap around the key initiatives and epics that drive your overall project or program. 
• Establish clear timelines: Assign realistic start and end dates for your roadmap items to help stakeholders understand the project timeline.
• Highlight dependencies: Identify and visually represent interdependencies between different roadmap items to uncover potential bottlenecks.
• Customize the view: Experiment with different roadmap layouts, filters, and groupings to find the most effective way to present the information.
• Link to Jira issues: Connect your roadmap items to the underlying Jira issues, stories, and tasks to provide rich contextual information.
• Regularly review and update: Monitor your roadmap and make updates as project priorities, timelines, or resource allocations change.
• Start simple and iterate: Don’t try to build the perfect roadmap from the start. Begin with the basics and gradually add more sophistication as your team gets comfortable with the Jira roadmap tool.

Elevate Your Project Management with Jira Roadmaps

Jira roadmaps are essential for driving your projects and initiatives forward. By leveraging this Jira feature, you gain clear visibility into your team’s priorities, dependencies, and timelines — providing you with the insights needed to make informed decisions and ensure alignment among team members.

The possibilities are limitless when you apply best practices, customize, and integrate your Jira roadmaps in various ways.