Pendo Roadmaps is a flexible tool that can be used in different ways. You can show broad themes of work you plan on delivering in coming quarters to leadership and communicate what’s coming with stakeholders who can then get prospects and customers excited about where you’re heading.
Roadmaps are intended for internal teams. They aren't customer-facing but you can download your roadmap as an image to share externally. For more information, see the Roadmaps visibility section in this article.
This article describes the Roadmaps in Pendo Engage experience, which includes the ability to:
- Create roadmaps with a quarterly timeframe.
- Create features and initiatives.
- Drag-and-drop functionality.
- UI interactions that allow you to reference feature and initiative details without leaving the page.
- A backlog where you can add and remove features and initiatives.
- Download functionality to share your roadmaps in presentations and outside your organization.
For instructions on how to build roadmaps in Pendo Engage, 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 and features along a timeline with defined start and end dates. Use the quarterly boundaries to indicate timings across your initiatives and features. You can start your quarterly boundaries at any month of the year to align your your roadmaps to you 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 and features 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 and features
You can populate your roadmap with two 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 towards 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.
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 editors can set statuses for the initiatives and features in a roadmap from the dropdown menu in the right-side panel when you open an initiative or feature. The status options are the same as the status options for ideas in Validate:
- New
- Under Consideration
- In Discovery
- In Development
- Now Available
- Archived
Nesting
You can nest features 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.
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 nested within an initiative, which means you can specify more granular timeframes for nested items rather than forcing features 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 in order to communicate what will be built first as part of an initiative, and when.
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.
You can then open an individual item in the backlog and review the information in the Overview tab. Select View in the top-right corner of the initiative or feature's card to view its details. Select View in Backlog to view the list of items again in the backlog again. For more information see View item details in the Create and edit roadmaps article.
Access and sharing
By default, all new roadmaps are set to Private (Only Me). To share your roadmap with more people, select the Share button at the top of your roadmap. You can either share with specific people or copy the link.
Add email addresses to the Sharing with People field to specify people that you would like to grant either Viewer or Editor access to. You can only add email addresses of users that have access to the Pendo account. Select the access level using the dropdown menu to the right of the search box.
Choose Get Link if you want to update and provide access to everyone on the subscription. Select Share with <subscription>. This then turns into a dropdown menu where you can select Restricted if you want to reset the access level. This removes access for anyone on the account except anyone that you've specified in the Sharing with People field.
If sharing with the subscription, choose either Viewer or Editor access from the first dropdown menu and then select Copy Link to share with others.
The user access (Share with People) overrides the general access provided by the link.
Initially, the new roadmap experience is available to internal teams only. However, you can download your roadmap to share it as an image (PNG) with others. Select the ellipsis (...) at the top of your roadmap to open the dropdown menu and select Download.
Multiple roadmaps
You aren’t limited to one roadmap. 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 table. You can also search roadmaps using the search function in the top-right corner of the table.