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Roadmaps in Lane help you communicate your product strategy, align cross-functional teams, and keep stakeholders informed—whether you’re planning high-level goals or detailed feature releases. With flexible layouts and deep customization, you can create strategic or delivery-focused roadmaps tailored to how your team works.

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Roadmap styles in Lane

Lane supports two styles of roadmaps:
  • Board style: A board-style view, great for visualizing strategic themes, OKRs, or initiatives over time.
  • Timeline style: A horizontal timeline layout, ideal for planning feature releases, product launches, or sprint cycles.

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Creating roadmaps

Roadmaps in Lane are powered by the objects you already manage - Objectives and Features. You can build different kinds of roadmaps depending on your planning needs. 
  • Strategic Roadmap: Highlights strategic objectives, helping teams align on long-term goals and priorities.
  • Release Roadmap: Focuses on upcoming releases, helping teams plan and communicate what’s shipping next.
  • Now Next Later Roadmap: Use a Board style layout with Features or Objectives to plan and communicate short-, mid-, and long-term priorities.
You can start from a ready-made template or build your roadmap from scratch.

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Board roadmap

The Board-style roadmap is ideal when you want to visualize priorities, OKRs, or initiatives across different stages or timeframes. It helps teams align around what’s in focus now, what’s coming next, and what’s planned later. To create a board style roadmap:
  1. Click the + icon next to Roadmaps in the sidebar.
  2. Under the Board style, select a ready-made template or start customizing your layout from the ground up.
  3. Select the Primary object (Objectives or Features).
  4. Customize as per the requirement:
    • Column: Based on timeframe, release stages, or statuses.
    • Group: Product, assignee, etc.

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Timeline roadmap

The Timeline-style roadmap is best suited for planning initiatives, releases, or features across specific time periods. It’s ideal when you need to communicate delivery schedules, milestones, or dependencies clearly to stakeholders. To create a timeline style roadmap:
  1. Click the + icon next to Roadmaps in the sidebar.
  2. Under the Timeline style, select a pre-defined template or start customizing from scratch.
  3. Select the Primary object (Objectives or Features).
  4. Add a Group if needed to provide more detailed visibility

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Working with Timeline Roadmap

The Timeline roadmap offers an intuitive, interactive way to plan:
  • Zoom levels: Switch between Month, Quarter, or Year views to focus on the level of detail you need.
  • Adjustable scale: Stretch or compress the timeline to get a broader or more detailed view.
  • Drag and drop: Move cards directly along the timeline to update schedules instantly.
These capabilities make the Timeline roadmap ideal for visual planning, tracking milestones, and keeping delivery timelines current. 

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Sharing roadmaps

Roadmaps are account-level objects—every roadmap created is visible to all members within your Lane workspace. Roadmaps can be shared in two ways:
  • Internal sharing (Company): Automatically accessible to all team members inside Lane by default for every roadmap created.
  • Public sharing: Share a view-only version with external stakeholders, such as customers or partners, via a secure public link. To learn more about sharing publicly, see the Public Roadmaps section below. 

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Public roadmaps

Public roadmaps make it easy to share your product plans transparently with customers, partners, or stakeholders outside your organization.

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Key benefits

  • Keep external stakeholders informed without granting workspace access.
  • Build trust and transparency by showing what’s planned, in progress, and completed.
  • Easily share updates through a clean, read-only view.

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How public roadmaps work

  1. When you make a roadmap public, a custom link is automatically created.
  2. This link is different from the internal company link and can be customized to your preference.
  3. The public URL includes your company slug, formatted as: 
    app.laneapp.co/company-slug/roadmap/custom-name
  4. Whatever display options are enabled inside Lane (such as assignee, status, tags) will be visible on the public side.
  5. Public roadmaps are view-only, so external viewers can see progress but not edit.

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Sharing your public roadmap

  • Add your public link to your website, newsletters, or customer updates.
  • Use it in stakeholder reviews to communicate progress and priorities.

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Removing public access

If you want to make the roadmap private again, simply change its visibility setting back to Company — the public link will no longer be accessible.
Currently, public roadmaps are only supported for Board-style roadmaps.

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Best practices

  • Start with a template to quickly spin up your first roadmap.
  • Keep roadmaps updated by linking to real-time progress from connected objects.
  • Share public views during customer calls or stakeholder reviews for transparency.

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FAQs

Q: Can I include multiple objects in the same roadmap?
A: Each roadmap is powered by a single object (Objectives or Features) but you can create multiple roadmaps for different layers of planning. Q: Can I change the layout after creating a roadmap?
A: The layout (Timeline or Board) is set during creation and cannot be changed later. You can create a new roadmap if you want to switch formats. Q: Who can see a public roadmap?
A: Anyone with the public link can view the roadmap. They don’t need a Lane account.