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How can we highlight changes to our roadmap?

1 month ago
12 May 2022
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susanshev
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We’re putting a lot of work into refining our product feature plans & release activities and getting ready to make our roadmap “public” to the rest of the company.

Is there a way to indicate what has changed recently on a roadmap? I know that the roadmap will display the latest & greatest PB feature information, which is awesome, BUT we may need to highlight large moves to ensure people understand that something moved.

For example, Big-Feature-A is planned for Q2-22 release and has been communicated & discussed with the world. Something happened & now Big-Feature-A will be pushed to Q3-22. Simply looking at the latest roadmap will show the updated timeline, but unless you’ve memorized what was in Q2 & Q3, you may not notice. In addition, I may want to put a comment about WHY it moved, so that people understand the reasoning & logic behind the decision.

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Best answer by scott.baldwin 12 May 2022, 18:13

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scott.baldwin
Community Lead
709 replies
1 month ago
12 May 2022
Answer

Hi @susanshev,

We don’t have anything that captures changes specifically, and agree that’s an interesting problem that we’ve heard about

One approach we do have is our recently released integration with Loom that allows you to capture and share a Loom video walkthrough of your roadmap where you could convey these details on the changes, more information on that here:

In addition, comments can be recorded on items in Productboard and are available to anyone viewing your roadmap internally.

Out of curiosity, how might you imagine that working? Would this be some sort of snapshot of the past and present roadmap and a way to compare the two? Some kind of alerts or notifications? Something else?

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susanshev
Author
Questioner
4 replies
1 month ago
13 May 2022

@scott.baldwin : thanks for this idea. Comments can definitely help, I think. I haven’t tried that yet.

I’m not totally sure how this could manifest. I was hoping you had already figured it out 😁

Maybe it’s a specific roadmap view that shows changes, similar to dependency lines with arrows showing where something was & where it is now? Or a more robust report or audit trail of scheduling changes (vs. having to click into each feature to see its history).

Userlevel 7

+12

scott.baldwin
Community Lead
709 replies
1 month ago
13 May 2022

Yeah, I hear ya. Just trying to better understand what good looks like here so we can share that with our product team. Essentially sounds like you want some way to be able to see the changes that have happened and how your roadmap has changed over time and ways in which to notify others of change that are a bit more automated.

p.s We do have an audit log capability that given you insights into workspace events from the past 90 days, but it requires the Enterprise plan.

There are a few use cases I’d like to solve here:

I have PMs who work for me and I’d like to review how the overall roadmap has changed based on their recent work without having to watch every productboard feature and piece it together in my head
I periodically review the roadmap with various audiences and I want to easily be able to highlight what changed so that I can just walk them through the changes.
I have viewers who irregularly view the roadmap and I’d like them to be able to easily see what’s changed on their own

Here’s an idea how it might work:

User invokes something to enter “what’s changed” or “diff mode”, optional capability to indicate how far back you’re checking for changes
Everything on the roadmap with a major change is highlighted (including some kind of display of items no longer visible on the roadmap)
1. Major changes, are being added to the roadmap, having the start/end date change, or 20%+ of the description being updated
While what’s change mode is active, there is a special hover over highlighted items that indicates what nature of the change(s) causing the highlight