Plan, visualize, and communicate work more effectively with the Roadmap
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Plan, visualize, and communicate work more effectively with the Roadmap

Tiffany Go
Head of Product Marketing
November 18, 2020

Roadmap (which some of you may know by its previous name, Timeline View) is now available in Shortcut Labs! With the Roadmap, you can visualize and communicate planned work to leadership and stakeholders while also getting a clear look at how work is progressing across the entire org.

The Roadmap is flexible, easy to use, and makes communicating and sharing progress a whole lot faster and easier. Map short-term efforts to long-term business goals, keep your team ahead of blockers, plan the best course of execution, and manage expectations with an easily digestible big picture view of everything going on.

Visualize business initiatives to plan and collaborate more effectively

The Roadmap displays multiple Epics together on a timeline for a tidy view of what's happening across the org, enabling multiple product squads – and multiple departments – to plan potentially complex and interdependent business initiatives. This is particularly useful during a product launch, as it can bring the work of engineering, product development, marketing, customer support, and every departmental initiative into one view for easy, collaborative planning.

Shortcut Roadmap
Shortcut Roadmap

Note that Epics need to have a start and end date to show on the Roadmap view. Without these dates, Epics appear to be eternal, which brings up ontological questions about the nature of time and reality that Roadmap is not qualified to answer.

Share a source of truth with your team with less fuss

Has any software in history ever shipped exactly on time without any bugs or road bumps? Even the best laid plans are bound to change when you're managing a software project. This becomes even more of a hassle when you have to update everything, everywhere, to make sure changes are accurately reflected for anyone who needs to know about it. That's why the Roadmap automatically updates when you make changes to Epics, saving you the hassle of updating information in multiple places. It'll reflect date changes, rescoping of work, and progress updates.

Track, prioritize, and adjust work directly in the Roadmap

The Roadmap displays Epics sorted by Priority. Highest is top priority, while bottom is lowest priority. This makes it easy to see dependencies and bottlenecks to ensure you're on track to shipping (or coming pretty close to shipping) on time.

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Prioritize with the Shortcut Roadmap

But you can do more than just see things; you can also do things. Like drag-and-drop Epics above one another to designate their priority in the Roadmap, or shift and move the timeline of individual Epics to ensure planned work is aligned with the timing of other, interdependent work.

Shift and move the timeline of Epics in the Shortcut Roadmap

Provide stakeholders updates without the noise

The Roadmap view surfaces information with a level of abstraction and detail that shows stakeholders how things are going without overwhelming them with information. This drilled-down view allows everyone to grasp the approximate scope of that work to manage their own planning and dependencies. We plan on releasing more filters to help you further drill into the views you care about most.

Filter views in the Shortcut Roadmap

What's next for the Roadmap feature

See Milestones alongside Epics in the Roadmap
See Milestones alongside Epics in the Roadmap
  • See Milestones alongside Epics
  • Customize views with filters for Quarter, Projects, Teams (currently Groups), Milestones, Epic States, and Labels
  • Show off public roadmaps in Presentation mode to make sharing even easier
  • Export the Roadmap to add it to external documents or print it out to use as beautiful decor for your living room

How to access and use the Roadmap

The Roadmap is available as part of Shortcut Labs. Shortcut Labs is accessible to organizations on a Standard Plan or higher. If you're on the Free Plan and would like to use the Roadmap, you can upgrade to Standard no matter how many users are in your organization.

To enable the Roadmap view for Epics, navigate to your Account Settings <> Workspace Features <> Shortcut Labs and toggle it on. The icon will appear in your left navigation.

Reminder: Only Epics with Start and End Dates will show up in the Roadmap! Epics without dates exist outside of the concept of time, making them impossible to display on a timeline.

Roadmap is part of Shortcut Labs. Get an overview of Labs by watching the video below:

<iframe title="vimeo-player" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/480644430?h=790fa98bfe" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

We hope you find the new Roadmap feature useful and that it helps you plan more effectively. Please let us know what you think, as we'll use your thoughts to make it even better!

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