Operations

Planning a Roadmap

A roadmap plots epics across quarters, one row per project. Here is how work gets onto it, how far out to plan, and why an empty quarter is often the honest answer.

How work gets onto the roadmap

The roadmap does not plot tickets. It plots epics — and an epic only appears once somebody has said which quarters it spans. Three steps:

  1. File tickets under an epic. Open a ticket and pick one, or set it when you create the ticket. A ticket with no epic is perfectly valid work — it just won't show up here.
  2. Give the epic a start and target quarter. That is what turns it into a bar. Until then it waits in the Unscheduled tray under its project.
  3. Drag it. Grab the middle of a bar to move it, or either edge to stretch it. Everything snaps to whole quarters.

Why quarters, and not dates

A roadmap that recorded “the 14th of March” would be claiming a precision nobody planning two quarters out actually has. Quarters are coarse on purpose: they are about the order and rough timing of big things, and they stay honest when the details move — which they will.

Day-level planning happens in sprints, where a two-week commitment is something a team can actually hold.

Reading a roadmap

  • Each row is one project, and each bar within it is an epic. A project with several bars in the same quarter is doing several things at once — which may be fine, or may be the thing to notice.
  • Read down a column, not just across a row. Everything in the same quarter is what the company is committing to at the same time. That is the question a roadmap exists to answer.
  • An empty quarter is a real answer. A roadmap with every quarter full to the edge for the next two years is a wish list, not a plan.

How far out to plan

The default view shows six quarters, which covers the rest of this year and most of the next. That is about the limit of useful planning for most teams: near quarters hold specific epics, far ones hold intentions.

Widen the window when you need to show a longer arc, and narrow it when you want the next two quarters to fill the screen. It changes what you see, never what is stored.