Public Roadmap Tool
What is a Public Roadmap
A public roadmap is a strategic plan that outlines the future direction of a company or product development. A high-level document typically communicates the company’s vision, mission, and goals to its stakeholders, including customers, employees, investors, and partners.
Benefits of a Public Roadmap
The purpose of a public roadmap is to provide transparency and increase engagement with stakeholders.
Presenting the product vision to users and requesting feedback creates a win-win situation.
Transparency increases user involvement and offers proactive assistance from people who have worked on similar problems.
A public roadmap provides an additional feedback loop to the product development process.
What Makes a Great-Working Public Roadmap
At Ducalis, we help our customers organize their product management processes. After analyzing hundreds of public roadmaps, we have compiled a list of recommendations.
Regularly Update the Roadmap
The Biggest Problem: Do not abandon your Public Roadmap. A public roadmap should be regularly updated to reflect changes, ensuring the company remains focused on its goals and adapts to changing circumstances. Otherwise, without updates, your public roadmap will serve the opposite role—spurning your users.
Regularly create public ideas from your task tracker's backlog after sprint planning.
Use a consistent format to describe your public ideas (consider using an idea template).
Utilize the AI re-writing feature to publish your backlog item from a task tracker to the Public Roadmap.
Use the Auto-Status update feature to synchronize your public roadmap issues with task tracking.
Easily Subscribe for Updates
A regularly updated public roadmap attracts your most loyal product users. Do not miss an opportunity to engage them with a fresh roadmap update in their inbox.
Make a roadmap subscription button the highest priority call-to-action on your roadmap.
Create a regular public Roadmap newsletter.
Post social media updates from your public roadmap.
Involve Sales and Support Teams
Users frequently request new features. An up-to-date public roadmap allows them to see upcoming integrations and deal-breaking features. Invite your sales and support teams to create new roadmap items on behalf of users and subscribe to receive updates on their progress.
Trustworthy Experience
Some companies create public roadmaps using tools like Notion or Trello. However, these platforms may not provide enough branding options to make the voting board feel like a natural part of your product. To improve your public roadmap's branding, consider the following:
Embed the public roadmap into your product.
Host the public roadmap on your domain.
Use your corporate colors and logos.
Set your corporate email domain for sending roadmap updates.
Delivery Stages
By default, your public roadmap includes only a few statuses: Under Review, Planned, In Progress, and Done. To improve transparency and manage expectations, you should customize the stages to match your delivery cycle, such as Research, In Beta, Closed Access, Cloud Only, etc. If you have strict deadlines for feature delivery, you can rename your statuses to Q4 23, Q1 24, etc.
Fast Search and Filtering
Even your most loyal users won't wait for all upcoming product features. Let them segment the public roadmap with labels, show their upvotes and requests, and highlight feature areas (components).
The faster and easier it is for your users to search, the more engaged they will be in your product development.
Multiple Component Roadmaps for Large Products
If your product is massive, you may sell it in components, have multiple sub-products, or have too many public roadmap items. To manage this complexity, we recommend dividing your roadmap into various parts and assigning each one a separate roadmap. With Ducalis, you can create as many roadmaps as you need.
Multi-Language Roadmaps
If you have an international product with marketing websites in multiple languages, having your product roadmaps available in all your main languages is a good idea. Make sure to set the language of each voting board to match its board language.
Conclusion
A public roadmap is essential for any company or organization that wants to communicate its vision and engage with its stakeholders. By providing transparency and demonstrating a commitment to its goals, a public roadmap can help to build trust and loyalty with customers, employees, investors, and partners.
Check out Ducalis Voting Boards' features here, and create your free Public Roadmap by signing up here.
