Roadmap template

Use this template to create an experienced-based roadmap to outline the features and value of a project, product, or initiative in different stages of development. The roadmap template helps you understand a customer or user’s experience at every stage of the product and lets you strategically plan its direction.

A roadmap gives a visual timeline of your product’s progression so that all departments in your company are on the same page as to where your product is headed and how you will get there. The roadmap helps create a single source of truth for your product plan, improving project management, clarifying long-term goals, and aligning teams around a unifying product vision.

The roadmap template helps you:

• Visually organize your projects based on stages of development
• Identify areas to add value to projects at every stage
• Get broad alignment on project goals and initiatives
• Increase transparency and build trust with stakeholders

How to use the roadmap template

To use Mural’s roadmap template, follow the steps outlined below with your team.

1. Define your objective

The first step is to make sure you can describe your project succinctly, using no more than 1-2 sentences or phrases. Add this description to the appropriate section in the mural.

2. Brainstorm key elements of the experience across each stage of development

The next step is to bring your team together to brainstorm key aspects of the user experience across all three stages, from five different perspectives:

• What is the experience?
• What are the main capabilities necessary?
• What other capabilities are there or could be added?
• What is the value to the customer?
• What do we want to learn?

Use the color-coded sticky notes across all the categories to capture your team's ideas (one idea per sticky note).

3. Analyze and synthesize feedback

Once your team has added their ideas as sticky notes across all three stages and all five categories, look for groups or themes that can be clustered together and summarized. This will reduce clutter and repetition, and allow you to begin assigning tasks and action items based on team capacity and areas of expertise.

Note: Use Mural’s Jira integration to seamlessly update your progress

• Import Jira tickets into your roadmap template. The ability to note bugs through Jira is very helpful for collaborative roadmaps. Instead of remembering to transcribe the note to another format, simply import issues from Jira as sticky notes. You can also re-import issues into a mural to receive updated statuses or priority changes.
• Export mural sticky notes into Jira. You can also export sticky notes created in your mural directly into Jira and set basic attributes from that sticky note. This is especially helpful when teams are collaborating on a roadmap template, and their additions require separate bug tickets.

Read more about the Mural + Jira integration

Tips for running a roadmap template workshop

To get the most out of Mural’s roadmap template, you use these tips and suggestions:

• At the beginning of your roadmap creation, you need to ask: Why are you creating this? What do you want your end result to be? By answering these, the rest of the roadmap will be easier to complete. Think of this as a high-level overview for the roadmap that introduces the product goals.
• Use features like Mural’s private mode to avoid groupthink even while brainstorming in real time, and anonymous voting to improve prioritization and democratically select the best options moving forward. You can also use color-coding to help visually identify groups or themes, and tags for sticky notes to assign individual tasks to team members.
• After your roadmap is created, you want buy-in from stakeholders and team members to see what works, what might be a problem, and what can be improved in the next iteration.