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Overview

Roadmaps are essential tools for product and strategy teams. They bring visibility into what’s coming, communicate priorities clearly, and help teams stay aligned around shared goals. Without a roadmap, teams often fall into reactive execution - shipping in silos, missing dependencies, or drifting from the bigger picture. Roadmaps are more than timelines - they’re strategic tools that communicate priorities, align teams, and show how individual efforts ladder up to business outcomes. In Lane, you can create roadmaps that are tailored to your planning needs, whether you’re aligning on quarterly objectives or coordinating an upcoming release.
1

Start with the Purpose

Every roadmap should begin with a clear purpose. Defining this upfront helps ensure you’re not just visualizing tasks, but enabling better decision-making.
  • Strategic Planning: Build alignment around goals, initiatives, and themes across the company. Useful for leadership and cross-functional teams.
  • Release Planning: Coordinate delivery timelines, handoffs, and go-to-market plans. Best suited for product and engineering teams.
  • Prioritization & Visibility: Provide clarity into what’s being worked on and why. Helps with cross-team alignment and stakeholder updates.
Being intentional about the roadmap’s purpose ensures you’re solving the right problem for the right audience.
2

Choose the Right Object

Lane supports multiple object types - each designed for a different level of planning. Choosing the right object sets the foundation for your roadmap’s depth and focus.
  • Objectives: Ideal for high-level, strategic planning. Use these when mapping initiatives or OKRs.
  • Features: Use for delivery-focused planning - such as upcoming releases or feature rollouts.
  • Insights: Perfect for discovery roadmaps, where you want to explore patterns in feedback and customer demand.
By choosing the right object, you ensure that your roadmap aligns with how your team thinks about strategy and execution.
3

Pick the Roadmap Style

Once you’ve chosen the object, decide how you want to visualize the work. Lane offers two flexible styles:
  • Swimlane Roadmap: Great for high-level planning and visual grouping. Use it to map work across objectives, teams, or themes.
  • Timeline Roadmap: Ideal for time-based planning. Best when you need to show delivery windows, dependencies, or sequencing.
The style you choose should reflect how your audience prefers to consume information — whether by theme or by time.
4

Customize and Organize

Lane’s roadmaps are built to adapt to your workflow. Once your roadmap is created, you can tailor it with flexible configuration options:
  • Columns: Add timeframes, releases, or importance to anchor work chronologically.
  • Group and Sub-group: Use these to structure your roadmap by product, team, customer segment, or initiative.
  • Tags and Filters: Apply filters to narrow the scope and make the roadmap relevant to different audiences.
Grouping and sub-grouping offer advanced control - allowing you to maintain clarity even in complex planning scenarios.
5

Share, Review, and Evolve

Roadmaps should never be static. As priorities shift and work progresses, they need to stay updated.
  • Share roadmaps with your team, leadership, or stakeholders for transparency and alignment.
  • Use them in key rituals like OKR check-ins, planning meetings, or retros.
  • Regularly review and adjust to reflect reality — outdated roadmaps can erode trust.
By keeping roadmaps dynamic and collaborative, you turn them into living assets that guide execution.

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Best Practices

  • Start with one roadmap per planning layer - strategic, delivery, discovery.
  • Define a clear audience and purpose for each roadmap.
  • Avoid mixing unrelated work in the same view.
  • Use status and health fields to flag risks and show progress.
  • Keep the roadmap visible - not hidden in a slide deck.

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