Note: This article refers to releases and features. Depending on your workspace type, you may see "schedules" and “activities" in your workspace. |
Aha! Roadmaps | Features and activities roadmap
You likely spend hours every month crafting perfect roadmap views for each of your key stakeholders. We know it's tedious when you must make small changes that lead to hours of additional formatting work in Excel and PowerPoint.
Enter the features roadmap. Use this roadmap to highlight what your team is building and when you expect to deliver it. You can focus this roadmap around features or epics and customize it to include important data, hide superfluous records, track the progress of your work, or add some leeway to your release dates.
Click any of the following links to skip ahead:
Create a features roadmap
Navigate to Roadmaps Features to access and adjust your features roadmap. The roadmap will load and show you features in upcoming releases for the workspace where you created the roadmap.
You can adjust the roadmap to fit your particular audience or area of inquiry, including adding filters. Hover over the filters bar and click the Add filters + icon to add basic filters quickly, or click the Edit filters icon to add advanced filters to your roadmap.
Choose releases
Use the Releases dropdown to select which releases to add to your roadmap. By default, the timeline will include current releases for the workspace you are viewing. With the Releases dropdown, you can add past releases and releases from other workspaces to the timeline.
By clicking the small arrow by a workspace or workspace line on the releases dropdown, you can also select all releases and automatically update when new releases are added.
Customize your roadmap
Customize the detail you show at the release and feature level with the Customize view dropdown.
Checkboxes in this dropdown to tailor your roadmap to your intended audience. For example, customers may appreciate seeing the release theme and key features, while internal stakeholders will especially want to see how each release links to your strategic goals and initiatives.
A few of these customization options are worth highlighting.
First, you can show the progress of your roadmap through release and feature statuses. But for a more exact visualization, choose to Show progress for your releases or features (if you have chosen to build this roadmap around epics, you can show progress for epics as well). If you have enabled progress in your account, this option will add progress bars to the record type you select — for example, selecting Show progress under the Features column will display a progress bar for any feature that has a progress field added to it. The features roadmap will display a completion percentage based on whatever progress calculation has been set on each individual record.
Second, you can choose whether to present your internal or external release date. An external release date can be rounded to a broader time frame — such as a release month, or a release quarter — if you are not ready to commit to a specific release day. Teams practicing continuous deployment, or teams presenting a features roadmap to an audience that should not see a specific date tend to display external release dates on their features roadmap.
Finally, to further illustrate how each highlighted feature delivers specific categories of functionality or customer requests, you can show default and custom fields.
Note: If you choose to include custom fields, they will display in the order that they appear in your custom layout.
Customize the roadmap's time range
Set your timeline to display the time period of your choice. You can specify the timeline start and end dates for the display, along with the desired time scale of days, weeks, months, or quarters.
If you are showing releases that fall outside the bounds of your selected start and end dates, you will be notified with a link on either end of your timeline that additional releases are outside your selected date range.
Display epics
If you have epics enabled in your account, there are two ways to include them in your features roadmap.
First, you can choose to visualize epics in the context of your releases and features. Click the Customize view dropdown and select Show epics. The epics will then display as objects on the release below your goals and initiatives.
Second, you can build your whole roadmap around epics rather than features. Click the Epics toggle at the top-left of your roadmap. This will focus your roadmap on epics and their releases. You can then use the Customize view dropdown to customize your epics roadmap, just as you would for a features roadmap. Checkboxes under the Releases or Epics columns to show tags, status, or progress, external dates, or custom fields.
Only show specific features
Choose which releases you want to share, then choose the features that you want to highlight by checking the boxes next to any that are relevant. Unchecked boxes will not be visible in the published view of your Aha! Roadmaps presentation.
Features will display in the same sort order as they appear on the Features Board page which represents their prioritized rank order.
You can also add filters to bulk edit which features are visible on your timeline.
Use other views
After you have spent so much time adding filters to focus your features roadmap, it is often helpful to view that same data in different formats. Use the Change view type dropdown to switch between several common views while retaining any filters you have added.
Note: Filters you add yourself will transfer to a new view. Page filters — filters associated with the original view that cannot be removed — will not appear on the new view.
Your View type options are:
Board: A view of all your epics and features across all your releases and parking lots.
List: A prebuilt list report of your epics and features.
Workflow: A kanban-style view of your initiatives, epics, features, and requirements.
Roadmap: This is your features roadmap.
Save your roadmap
To save your current view, click the Views dropdown on the top right corner of the page and select Save view. When you save a view, you will have the option to name it, choose who you wish to share your saved view with, and select if others can edit the view. The Views dropdown lets you access any view you have ever saved.
Share your roadmap
With your features roadmap completed, you can easily share it with your stakeholders by selecting one of the export options under the Share button on the top-right of the page.
To fold your roadmap into a presentation, select Add to presentation. In your presentation, you can select the roadmap's update frequency.
To invite people outside of your Aha! Roadmaps account to view your roadmap, select Share as webpage.
To schedule recurring email delivery of your roadmap, select Schedule email delivery.
For a static version of your roadmap, select Save as image or Save as PDF.