Introduction
A Gantt Chart is a tool that is used to show activities and efforts against time. While commonly used in project management, product managers can also use the concept to communicate a product’s roadmap — specifically, to visualize the plan to get the product from A to B along with the dependencies each item of that plan has amongst each other.
How do I make a Gantt Chart?
To make a Gantt Chart, start with a table whose columns represent time (weeks, months, quarters, etc.) and rows represent things to do.
Then, based on how you’ve prioritized your Roadmap, add bars for each thing to do — this represents when you will start work on that thing and when you expect to finish it.
Then, take note of which things are dependent on other things — e.g. if you have any items that cannot start work until something else is finished, ensure that they are logically (time-wise) sequenced. For example, if item Y cannot be done before X, then X may be scheduled from January to March while Y may be April to Jun.
Conclusion
And, there’s your Gantt Chart! A neat bonus of a Gantt Chart is that it can help you visualize what your product/feature’s critical path is — the least time necessary to achieve a particular goal. You can do this by observing where the start of your product/feature is and its path to the last piece of your product/feature is; e.g. what is the earliest possible date for your product/feature to be delivered assuming no downtime between each dependency involved.