18 comments

  • Jon MyersJon Myers, over 6 years ago

    This looks like a really interesting, well-made product (for your environment) that I suspect mirrors your product development process well.

    I’ve cobbled together a visual project roadmap in the past using Trello and Elegantt - and it was painful.

    I can see where this could be useful.

    I’m trying to understand where and how this would fit into product team’s existing workflows, what stakeholder(s) are ultimately responsible, and what is expected out of non-Admins (the types of engagement) who interact with Roadmap.

    Yes, I know it’s obvious - the Project Manager - managing the project source of truth - the Roadmap, and the pricing reflects that - “by Admin” - yet, then again, it’s not that obvious to me where this fits in.

    With the integrations (ex., Trello) - I see redundancies, scheduling conflicts, information conflicts - and the potential for confusion with regards to - where is the truth, what tasks do we have to do and when - according to the Roadmap.

    Further, I suspect due to the Admin/ permissions - it may be difficult to rectify these inconsistencies?

    “Where do I look to see what to do, when”

    And, of course, further - this all depends on the project, team and methodologies.

    For reference my current product design/ development stack typically looks something like (I’m sure I’m forgetting some things) this:

    • Slack - Team and app communications central.
    • ProductBoard - The product roadmap. The product source of truth. Love this product. Hate their Atlassian, HipChat style accounts system, i.e., one account per email. It’s not freelancer friendly. It’s corporate headed. This is why I chose Slack over HipChat back in the day, account creation. I would wager a bet if someone comes along that is just as good as ProductBoard with a better accounts system, they will overtake ProductBoard.
    • Google Apps - Deeper documentation, storage, etc.
    • Asana - Project planning and project management
    • Sketch - UX, UI, High-Fidelity
    • Invision - Feedback source of truth
    • Zeplin - Designer/ developer source of truth.
    • Jira - Software development, issue tracking, etc., (not loved, tolerated)
    • Notion.so - Company wide source of truth/ wiki by vertical, i.e., marketing SOPs, employee onboarding checklists, etc.,

    Would love more specifics on actual team workflows, and to be better educated on where Roadmap fits into those flows with actual use cases.

    At present - when looking through the marketing site, it all seems a bit paralyzing given the concerns above.

    I hope that was helpful feedback, congrats on the launch!

    It looks like a lot of work and polish went into this product.

    4 points
    • Farzad BanFarzad Ban, over 6 years ago

      Hey Jon, 



      Glad you liked Roadmap and thank you for your detailed feedback. 
 With Roadmap, we are starting from the bigger picture and working our way down to the details. 
We believe successful projects start with a well-defined plan that is visually clear to all members involved.
Everyone can see the master plan for the project instead of having them focused on their day to day tasks created by the manager while the managers sit with the plan in their head.

      

With Roadmap everyone can see: - Which phases a project consist of (ex. Design, Development, Marketing) - What each phase means in terms of actionable tasks and who’s responsible for them - Who’s working on what and how their work is connected to each other - Milestones, when things are due and what everyone is working towards

      So in short, the goal of Roadmap is to make that plan accessible to everyone for better communication and transparency. 
— Workflow and the reasoning behind our plan to integrate Roadmap with task management apps like Trello, Asana, Jira: In terms of your current workflow, Roadmap serves as an overview for apps like Productboard, Asana and Jira. 
All of these different task management apps focuses on day to day tasks and it makes it harder for you and your team to get the overview they need to understand the current status of the entire project, where they are and what they are working towards.

      So with the Trello (and other task management apps like Jira, Asana etc) we are able to pull all these tasks to our backlog so you can easily group the tasks and drop them into the plan to get the overview you need to understand the bigger picture and keep track of the deliveries/milestones in order to take the project from point A to B with clear estimates and later compare these estimates with actual times when the project is done. (longest sentence ever)

      Roadmap also helps managers with following up by notifying you and your team when things are due, weekly/daily priorities and it alerts you when someone doesn’t have anything to work on in advance or who has too much on their plate and much more.

      Hope that helps. Happy to jump on a call with you to have a deeper chat about why we built Roadmap and what we are aiming to accomplish with our app. My email: farzad@3dro.ps

      0 points
      • Jon MyersJon Myers, over 6 years ago

        Hey Farzad,

        Thanks for following up.

        That makes a little more sense.

        I did hop over and created an account to poke around as well.

        Previously, my confusion may have arisen from the semantics. I got the impression project requirements and tasks for those milestones would be managed here, etc., etc.,

        Though I see task management is on the horizon, thus the use case (where and when do I refer to this in my workday, where and when do others, what do the SOPs that support this look like) and series of overlaps is still cloudy in my head.

        As of now, I can see this is straight - Project > Project Component(s)/ Milestones > Timeline (estimated) > Timeline (actual) > History, a top-level Overview of all project inputs.

        That overview can be useful, especially for smaller projects such as the marketing site example, and especially for communicating with stakeholders. However, I wonder how often people would refer to it after they've seen it once.

        Additionally, I wonder how to make this (referring to the Roadmap) a habit with a team given the shallowness and obviousness/ overlap of information.

        Would they simply refer to the Slack update and be satisfied with that update.

        Where these things break for me, for example with Elegantt - and Trello - where I've done project planning, they fall apart with complex projects.

        Especially with nesting, especially with the oscillation of category, user/ team member, and project milestone/ component, sub-components (time objects) - all competing for real estate to signal to both a singular user (to the PM, where we at) and broad audience (team where am I at - who is slowing me down, and stakeholders how is my project doing) in the timeline and status.

        I suspect Roadmap may run into similar issues with complex projects given the neutrality of the application and objective to agnostically serve projects of all and competing types.

        To further compound things with complex projects, when trying to chunk this information into coherent visual representations, you run out of visual cues.

        There are only so many colors before the waters get muddy and confusing.

        Leaning on one visual cue too heavily for complex projects - such as color, in this case, this reliance on color deadens its impact and renders the cue white noise, which distracts and potentially confuses contexts, i.e., status, project, my team, my status, etc., etc.,

        I would also be concerned about the cognitive load on the user when presented with a wall of timelines of varying colors, of timeline objects superimposed with color, containing objects (presumably a date badge) of a contrasting color to further signal a time event within an event.

        There's the potential for a lot of visual noise to get in the way of information processing.

        Then you have color blind users, you have users that literally see color differently due to their culture and means of identifying and codifying color. lol - Ugh, I know.

        Anyhow, this is a fun thought exercise and I'm thinking out loud here, which is again, hopefully useful.

        I don't have the answers either - just curious.

        I know this is an evolving product, there's certainly a need for a unified source of project truth.

        1 point
      • Shekhar Gurav, over 6 years ago

        Hey Farzad Absolutely amazing product. Kudos to your team! At what minimum team size do you think this will start paying off?

        0 points
  • CTodd LombardoCTodd Lombardo, over 6 years ago

    Heyo - Would love to chat with you. I'm co-authoring a book on Product Roadmapping due out on O'Reilly Media later this year.

    3 points
  • T. F., over 6 years ago

    Nice, but ... no scrum board ?

    1 point
    • Farzad BanFarzad Ban, over 6 years ago

      No scrum board, Roadmap is currently focusing on giving you the birds eye overview of all your projects and your teams schedules. We are working on Trello, Jira, Asana integrations so you can easily import the tasks and drop them in the plans to get the overview you need.

      0 points
  • Chris KalaniChris Kalani, over 6 years ago

    Congrats on the launch!

    1 point
  • Diego LafuenteDiego Lafuente, over 6 years ago

    Love the website. I am seeing more and more cleaner designs.

    1 point
  • Bobby Giangeruso, over 6 years ago

    So hot ✨

    1 point
  • Jonas SpottJonas Spott, over 6 years ago

    Really neat looking product!

    It could very well be used as a campaign planner as well. For that to be even better - it would be great to have sublevels :)

    Imgur

    0 points
    • Farzad BanFarzad Ban, over 6 years ago

      Thank you Jonas, glad you like Roadmap. Check out our Multi layout to group phases. Let me know if that works better for planning campaigns.

      0 points
  • Sergie MagdalinSergie Magdalin, over 6 years ago

    Nice polished product but it looks like a copy of Teamweek (https://teamweek.com/). How is it different?

    0 points
    • Farzad BanFarzad Ban, over 6 years ago

      Hi Sergie,

      Thanks, teamweek is a resource planning app while Roadmap is a project planning and team scheduling app. Its designed to help managers to plan any type of project in any size with ease, and share them with their team members or outside stake holders by sharing the link. Roadmap also helps you to automate your team scheduling process, follow-ups, compare estimates with actual time and much more.

      0 points