Product roadmap software helps software product managers with core planning tasks and communicate goals and status with project team members and stakeholders.
A product tool can help teams set strategy, prioritise goals, schedule work to be done, and keep everyone in sync throughout the product lifecycle, centralising all project information into a single dashboard.
The market for product roadmap software remains in the early stages, but is quickly gathering momentum, attracting startup companies and established tool vendors alike. Developers now have many roadmap tools to choose from. Here are several.
Airfocus
While Airfocus can be used in the development of any type of product, the focus is on software development projects. Airfocus vows to let users move beyond “clunky spreadsheets and gut decisions.”
Users can score projects and features to identify where to focus. Roadmap and prioritisation templates are featured.
Algorithms calculate priorities and visually map them out to help users make more-informed decisions. Airfocus also accommodates agile concepts, providing an agile roadmap and prioritisation template. Also, mobile apps are available to track projects. You can start a free trial at Airfocus.io.
Aha!
Aha! believes it is good to know where you are headed before you start building. The company defines a roadmap simply as a visual plan, insisting that every team doing meaningful work should have one. Aha’s SaaS application offers the following capabilities:
- Quickly build and share visual roadmaps
- Set company strategy
- Capture ideas
- Define features and mock up design details
- Prioritize requirements based on impact and effort
Aha! can support any development methodology including agile. It integrates with more than 30 tools ranging from GitHub and Jira to Slack and Salesforce. A free trial is available at Aha.io.
Craft.io
This agile-ready SaaS app provides an all-in-one product management solution, covering multiple phases including strategy and feature planning.
Craft.io integrates with tools such as Jira and GitHub to serve as a single system of record, allowing product managers to make decisions based on all available information.
Different views are offered for planning a roadmap, such as a tabled view or a Kanban view. Sprint planning is supported, as well. The development team gets automatic updates as work progresses. You can sign up for a free trial at Craft.io.
Monday.com
This SaaS application supports the product lifecycle with steps from product planning with the product team to getting user feedback from customer support.
Monday.com is described as agile software “for devs and non-devs alike” that can be customised for any team in any industry using methods such as Scrum or Kanban. Notifications and real-time reports help users track progress against the roadmap and stay focused on what is important. Other capabilities include:
- Plan, track, and collaborate in one tool
- Templates for project roadmap, sprint management, and bug tracking
- Manage stories, tasks, and bugs in a single board
- Integration with tools including GitHub and PagerDuty
You can get started with a free trial at Monday.com.
Productboard
Productboard is a cloud-based product management system intended for consolidating ideas, requests, and feedback in a single place. In addition to enabling users to share product roadmaps with customers, Productboard helps with making decisions about what actually should go on a product roadmap. Key features include:
- Agile roadmapping, offering flexibility and automatic updates when plans change
- High-level planning, helping to prioritize features and define objectives
- A portal for sharing plans and information about shipped functionality and for gathering feedback for the next iteration
- Integration with tools such as GitHub and Jira
You can sign up for a free trial at Productboard.com.
Roadmunk
Roadmunk is a SaaS application designed to make it easy to share and visualise a product strategy, so the product can be understood by multiple teams and stakeholders.
Roadmunk can be used for facilitating collaboration between product teams to reduce the “firefighting” time that product managers spend on meetings and team alignment.
To make it easy to present information on the roadmap to different audiences, Roadmunk offers timeline-based and theme-based formats. Roadmunk can be used for any type of product or project, while Roadmunk roadmaps can be used for project management or tasks such as marketing planning or human resources management. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial at Roadmunk.com.
ZenHub Roadmaps
ZenHub Roadmaps, introduced in November 2019, provides real-time visibility into GitHub-based software projects based on code updates. Accessible on both web and mobile browsers, this SaaS application draws on GitHub issue data and pull request activity for project status monitoring and decision-making.
Users including business stakeholders as well as developers can track the progress of software development work and measure it against completion goals.
Progress can be tracked on a weekly or monthly basis, with users able to click into “epics,” as in parent tasks and issues, to get a more granular view of issues and pull requests blocking progress. ZenHub Roadmaps is a feature of the ZenHub project management platform. A free trial is available at ZenHub.com.