Work

Roadmap

The Roadmap is a read-only timeline view over your Initiatives and the Projects linked to them. It exists so a busy team-lead, product manager or exec can…

Last updated

Overview

The Roadmap is a read-only timeline view over your Initiatives and the Projects linked to them. It exists so a busy team-lead, product manager or exec can answer "what are we shipping this quarter and what's slipping?" without opening every project detail page.

The page lives at /ws/{slug}/roadmap. Each row is an initiative; each bar represents the date range from its created_at to target_date. Child projects render as smaller bars under the parent. Theme tags become swimlane groupings.

Why it exists

Spreadsheet roadmaps go stale within a sprint. The Roadmap view never goes stale because it reads the live initiative + project rows — the same database the team is updating via the work pages — and re-renders on every navigation. There is no manual refresh, no "as of" footer, no parallel source of truth to keep in sync.

Like the Change calendar, the Roadmap is intentionally not a planning tool. It is a view. Edits happen on the underlying initiative/project pages; the Roadmap reflects them.

Key concepts

  • Swimlanes — initiatives grouped by their theme_tag. Initiatives with no theme group under an "Untagged" lane. The lane order is alphabetical by default; drag to reorder (the order is persisted per user in UIState).
  • Time window — toggle Q1 / Q2 / Q3 / Q4 / Year / Custom. Custom takes a from/to date range. The selected window is also persisted per user.
  • Bar colour — derived from initiative status: proposed = grey, active = blue, paused = amber (hatched), completed = green, cancelled = red strikethrough.
  • Project nesting — projects that belong to an initiative render as half-height bars under the parent. Project status maps the same status → colour scheme.
  • Today line — vertical dashed line at the current date. Bars that cross it without a forecast progress indicator are flagged with a yellow warning chip.
  • Dependencies — when a ChangeRequest is linked to an initiative and declares an upstream change dependency, the roadmap draws a thin arrow between the two bars. Helps spot "this initiative is blocked on platform work" without opening the change.

Common workflows

1. Find what slips this quarter

  1. Open Work → Roadmap. Set the window to This quarter.
  2. Scan the Today line — any initiative whose bar starts before the line but hasn't been marked completed is in-progress; any whose target_date is past the line and is still active is slipping.
  3. Click a slipping bar to open the initiative detail. Use that page's Risks card to see why.

2. See which themes are over-committed

  1. Switch grouping to By theme (default).
  2. Count the active bars per swimlane. Lanes with five or more concurrent active bars are usually the bottleneck — confirm by hovering the lane heading, which shows the total person-week estimate across linked projects.
  3. Decide whether to pause or descope before adding new initiatives to that theme.

3. Share a snapshot with leadership

  1. Pick the time window you care about.
  2. Click Export PNG (top right). The export captures the current viewport including the today line, swimlane headers, and the legend.
  3. The PNG is named roadmap-{workspace}-{date}.png so subsequent exports do not overwrite each other.

4. Hide noisy work to declutter

  1. Click the Filter chip in the toolbar.
  2. Toggle off proposed, cancelled or completed — the bars disappear but the data stays.
  3. Filter state is per-user and persists until you reset it.

Permissions

Action Roles
View roadmap All workspace members
Reorder swimlanes (per-user persistence) All workspace members
Export PNG All workspace members
Edit underlying initiatives/projects See those modules' permissions tables

The Roadmap is read-only — every edit drops through to the initiative or project detail page.

Troubleshooting

My initiative doesn't appear. Check that it has a target_date set. Initiatives without a target date are excluded because there is nothing to draw. Also confirm the window includes the initiative's created_at–target_date range; widening the window or switching to Year is the fastest test.

Bars overlap awkwardly. That's intentional — overlap is information. Two initiatives sharing a window in the same theme is a signal of concurrent commitment. If the visual gets unreadable, switch to grouping By owner so each person has their own row.

A project is on the roadmap but not under its initiative. The project isn't linked to an initiative. Open the project, set its Initiative field, and reload.

Related articles