Streamline your product management workflow with this Product Roadmap with Gantt template. Prepare for product launches and updates with row hierarchies, project management settings, and milestones. Visualize your roadmap on a Gantt view and share it with your team, your investors, or your customers. Now visualize yourself relaxing on a beach, fruity drink in hand. That's how it feels when you complete your product launch successfully. For at least a minute, anyway.
You wouldn't drive across the country without a roadmap. Well, today you'd probably use a GPS, but a GPS is just a device that looks at lots of roadmaps. Roadmaps provide you with a clear visual picture to understand where you're going, and how to get there. Product roadmaps work the same way; they show you the direction you want your project to go, and what you'll need to do in order to get there.
A product roadmap is a document that maps out your vision for the product as well as the strategy you plan to execute in order to achieve your goals. Inconveniently, a spreadsheet isn't quite as easy to understand at a glance as an actual roadmap. Conveniently, the data from a spreadsheet can be made more visually accessible by formatting it into a Gantt chart. And having that chart in the same document as your project roadmap makes it easier to update.
Thus, a product roadmap Gantt chart gives you a visual "big picture" overview just like an actual roadmap. It's a document you can refer to in order to make sure that you're going in the right direction to arrive at the destination you have in mind.
A mere 2.5% of companies manage to successfully complete 100% of their projects. This means that there are two obvious options for how to catapult yourself into the top 2.5% of all companies:
1) Successfully complete a single project and then never attempt another project again.
2) Keep your product management on track with a product launch plan and Gantt chart that guide your teams with clear direction.
If you want your product roadmap to feel more like a traditional roadmap, you can print it out on a large plotter printer. Tear off a corner, fold the roadmap 14 times, spill some coffee on it, and shove it into your glove compartment. Then get a co-worker to impatiently yell at you while you try to read it.
Although this product roadmap Gantt chart uses various colors to represent different teams working on your product, it does not use red. This is because whenever a group of software developers is designated as "red team," they will immediately begin attacking the software they are working on and try to break it. They can't help it; it's just instinct.
Use the Teams worksheet to define your Teams, including defining an "Overview" team to identify who is responsible for the overarching product milestones. Assign each team a Color for easy visual identification in the Gantt chart. And identify a Team Lead and Team Members for each team. Tasks for each team will be populated automatically using the Related Rows function once you fill out the Roadmap worksheet.
The Roadmap worksheet is where you'll lay out everything that needs to happen. Use the blue Overview category to list product-wide milestones and launch dates. Use the other colored parent rows as parent categories for your various teams, and list each team's tasks as separate child rows under the appropriate colored row.
For each Task, Assign a team member to be responsible for it, and select a Team (from the Teams worksheet) who will handle the task. Enter the Start Date, End Date, and Duration of the work period for each task. Track progress on each task by tagging a Status, and including a numerical Completion %. Add any necessary Attachments and Notes. Assign each task a Color, and optionally a Predecessor task which must be completed first.
The left-hand View options will let you see your product roadmap as a Gantt chart. Parent categories display as bracket lines, with child tasks under them. Milestones appear as diamonds on the timeline, while tasks appear as bars that extend across their duration. Bars are filled to indicate completion percentage, and a gray line with an arrow connects Predecessor tasks to reliant tasks. A vertical green line represents the current date.
Kanban Views are also available on the left-hand menu to stack cards by Status or Owner.
Because a product roadmap Gantt chart is the best of both worlds. It offers all the milestones and team assignments of a product roadmap, with the easy at-a-glance comprehensibility of a Gantt chart.
Which is not to say that every product needs both. If you're not coordinating multiple teams or working with a complex product that requires multiple milestones, you may not need a product roadmap. Maybe you'd rather just have a Simple Gantt Chart that gives you an intuitive visual overview of the required tasks for your project plotted on a timeline. A Gantt chart shows your stakeholders the general outline of how the project will proceed, in a format that's easy to understand.
Or conversely, maybe you don't have any stakeholders you need to present with a visual Gantt chart, but you need the strategic high-level breakdown of what each team needs to complete and where your product milestones are. Product managers in this situation might prefer a Product Roadmap with Kanban template that lets you sort and stack cards without bothering with a visual overview.
But if you want to have your cake and eat it too, and don't want to buy two cakes, then this free product roadmap with Gantt chart template has everything you need baked right in.
Product Managers with:
Multiple teams
Track the task progress of the various teams coming together to launch your product, and organize all of that information into a visual roadmap that helps them all understand how their work fits into the big picture.
Complex products
If your product launch is going to require multiple milestones and tons of tasks along the way, you'll benefit from an organized way to map them all out and track your progress.
Investors
Investors want to know when you're going to launch, what milestones you plan to accomplish along the way, and how much progress you've already made. A product roadmap Gantt chart lets them see all of this information at once.
