Introduction
A Timeline Roadmap is somewhat of a mix between traditional Roadmaps and Gantt Charts. Traditional Roadmaps communicate product vision and strategy. Gantt Charts communicate active efforts and dependencies. The two combined create Timeline Roadmaps, in that it communicates what the A to B is, the strategy to get from A to B, and how you and your team are tracking against that with respect to time.
How do I make a Timeline Roadmap?
A Timeline Roadmap’s basically a hybrid of the traditional Roadmap and a Gantt Chart. Consider a Roadmap helps communicate where and why a product is going a particular a direction and that a Gantt Chart communicates the plan on how the product will get from its current state to its desired state.
Thus, to create a Timeline Roadmap, one just needs to create a Gantt Chart and add in details on the vision and strategy of the product or feature. A common question is how is this any different from the Roadmaps we see today?
That is because, particularly in small-to-mid sized companies, roadmaps tend to actually be Timeline Roadmaps while larger, potentially enterprise-sized companies tend to separate the what/why from the how and use a traditional Roadmap and a Gantt Chart simultaneously.
Conclusion
There’s no one right way to create and present a roadmap to your stakeholders. Depending on your company and team and where they are with respect to the product’s journey, your roadmaps may be a communication of vision and strategy, or they may be a timeline from current to future, or even a hybrid of the two. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter so much how you approach your roadmap, so long as it’s clear what you’re aiming to do for the product and why.