A roadmap in Listen is a visual plan that maps key initiatives and features that you have committed to building. Pendo Roadmaps a flexible tool that can be used in different ways.
If you're a customer of the full Listen product, you can also add ideas to roadmaps, alongside your initiatives and features, to show internal stakeholders what you're considering. You can then promote ideas to features on your roadmap for ideas that you've decided to start building. For more information, see Add, promote, and remove ideas in your roadmaps.
This article provides an overview of functionality in Listen Roadmaps, which includes the ability to:
- Create roadmaps along a timeline or within a "now, next, later" framework.
- Create features and initiatives to a backlog.
- Use drag-and-drop functionality to add features, initiatives, and ideas to your roadmap.
- Group upcoming work into broad themes using swimlanes.
- Reference feature, initiative, and idea details without leaving the page.
- Share your roadmaps both internally and externally.
For instructions on how to build roadmaps in Pendo Listen, see Create and edit roadmaps.
Important: If you're looking for information on the Roadmaps experience in Pendo Feedback, see the Feedback Pendo Roadmap article.
Templates
Our customizable roadmap templates allow you to organize and communicate your product, project, or process in a traditional format (along a timeline) or with a kanban-style board (now, next, later).
Timeline
Use the Timeline template to track your progress over time. Visualize your initiatives, features, and ideas along a timeline with defined start and end dates. Use the quarterly boundaries to indicate timings across your initiatives, features, and ideas. You can start your quarterly boundaries at any month of the year to align your roadmaps to your planning cycles.
Now, Next, Later
Use the Now, Next, Later template to manage and track tasks that are in progress and upcoming. Plan and communicate what you're working on with an overview of priorities organized into four columns: Now, Next, Later, Complete.
Swimlanes
Regardless of which template you use, Roadmaps offers a theme-based view of your initiatives, features, and ideas using the swimlanes. These are flexible. For example, you can use swimlanes to group your roadmap items by product areas, company divisions, sectors, and so on. A roadmap must include at least one swimlane.
Initiatives, features, and ideas
You can populate your roadmap with three item types, which you can use to suit your roadmapping needs and company processes:
- Initiatives, represented by a purple rocket icon. Initiatives are typically used to organize larger categories of related work that each deliver incremental value toward an overall goal. Initiatives can contain features.
- Features, represented by a green star icon. Features are typically used to describe functional components of a product. Features can belong to a larger initiative, but they can also be standalone enhancements to your product.
- Ideas, represented by a pink light bulb icon. To have access to ideas, you must have the full Listen platform included in your contract. Ideas are created in the Validate page of Listen and are typically product ideas that you'd like to evaluate before committing to building them. For this reason, they are only visible in internal versions of a roadmap.
You can be as specific or as broad as you want with the items in your roadmap, in line with your company objectives or your team’s processes, and based on the target audience. For example, you might want a roadmap that's based on high-level plans to share as an image with your customers, and another roadmap that gives specific details about what to expect in the near future to share with sales.
Statuses
Roadmap Creators can set statuses for the initiatives and features in a roadmap. Listen Managers can set statuses for ideas. For more information about Listen permissions, see Roles and permissions.
Update the status of initiatives, features, and ideas using the dropdown menu in the right-side panel when you open an item. There are six possible statuses:
- New
- Under Consideration
- In Discovery
- In Development
- Now Available
- Archived
Nesting
You can nest features and ideas inside your initiatives to show the relationship between items in your roadmap and to show how your planned work is driving impact across the business. For example, you might use an initiative to illustrate the goal or objective and then nest features that you plan to deliver to meet that goal or objective within the initiative.
If you move an initiative with nested features into the backlog, the initiative and all features within it appear separately in the backlog but are still linked. For more information about nesting, see Link and nest items in Manage items in your roadmap.
Resizing
If you're using the timeline template, you can resize items on your roadmap so that they start and finish where you need them to along the timeline. This includes the individual features and ideas nested within an initiative, which means you can specify more granular timeframes for nested items rather than forcing features and ideas to span the full timeframe of the initiative.
For example, if you have an initiative that spans several quarters, you could have associated features nested within the initiative that you plan to build one after the other in two-week sprints. You can resize these features and place them along the timeline to communicate what will be built first as part of an initiative, and when.
For more information about resizing, see Move and resize items in Manage items in your roadmap.
Backlog
Initiatives and features are stored in your backlog, which you can open from the Backlog button in the top-right of the your roadmap. The opens a panel on the right side of the roadmap page.
Ideas are stored in the Validate page of Listen, but you can also view a list of them from within a roadmap when you select + Add to roadmap and then choose Add idea, which opens ideas in a panel on the right side of the screen.
You can then open an individual item from the panel and review the information in the Overview tab. Select View in the top-right corner of the initiative, feature, or idea card to view its details. For more information, see View item details in the Create and edit roadmaps article.
Access and sharing
By default, roadmaps are set to private and only accessible to you. You can share your roadmap with others, internally and externally, using the Share button at the top of your roadmap. For more information and instructions, see Share roadmaps.
Multiple roadmaps
You can create multiple roadmaps for different products and different audiences.
The Roadmap page lists all existing roadmaps visible to you. This includes roadmaps you’ve created alongside any roadmaps that were created by other people that have been shared with you. You can filter this list with the dropdown menus at the top of the page. You can also search roadmaps using the search function in the top-right corner of the table.