In Tech projects, there is the Product team from one side with all the amazing tools like Linear fully designed for them, but there is also the business side, and it’s where complications start.
Having a Public Roadmap is part of it ⚡️. Additionally, hosting the roadmap on your own domain allows for better customization and branding.
Common Challenges in Product Management:
Fragmented Communication: Often, we juggle multiple communication platforms (slack, WhatsApp, teams, call…) for different aspects of product management, leading to miscommunication and lost information.
Inefficient Client Interaction: Traditional methods of client interaction are time-consuming and prone to misunderstandings, there are notes everywhere.
Roadmap Visibility: Stakeholders, including clients, struggle to access real-time updates and progress reports, causing uncertainty and frustration. And most of the time, as PM we’re spending time sharing that info to create reinsurance 🎯
Efficiently managing customer feedback and support processes is crucial to ultimately ship well-crafted products.
And this last point is probably why you’re reading this article.
Building a Public Roadmap
Building a public roadmap is an essential step in creating a transparent and customer-centric product development process. By making your roadmap public, you can share your progress and plans with your customers, stakeholders, and team members, fostering trust, excitement, and engagement. Here are some key benefits of building a public roadmap:
Increased transparency: A public roadmap provides a clear view of your product’s development progress, helping to manage expectations and build trust with your customers.
Improved customer engagement: By sharing your roadmap, you can encourage customers to provide feedback, suggestions, and ideas, helping to shape your product’s development.
Enhanced collaboration: A public roadmap can facilitate collaboration among team members, stakeholders, and customers, ensuring everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals.
Better prioritization: A public roadmap helps you prioritize features and projects based on customer feedback, market trends, and business goals.
To build a public roadmap, you can use tools like Productlane, which integrates with Linear to automatically create and sync a public version of your roadmap. This allows you to tailor your roadmap to feature specific Linear teams, make it public whenever you’re ready, and customize its appearance to align with your brand.
How to make a Public Roadmap when you're using Linear
Go to workspace Roadmaps settings to turn on roadmaps for your workspace. Once you do, the Roadmap icon will appear in the lefthand sidebar, under Views.
You can choose the first month of the fiscal year if needed, which is used when grouping projects by quarters, half-year, and year.
To share it with your stakeholders, we were previously sharing screenshots of our “in-house” roadmap displayed in Linear. It’s very time-consuming, and not very scalable with multiple clients.
Start building products that resonate with users by focusing on collaborative efforts among product, marketing, and support teams to enhance product quality and appeal.
It's very time-consuming, and not very scalable with multiple clients.
Collecting and Integrating User Feedback
Collecting and integrating user feedback is crucial for building products that meet customer needs and expectations. By gathering feedback from various channels, you can gain valuable insights into your customers’ pain points, preferences, and suggestions. Here are some key benefits of collecting and integrating user feedback:
Improved product development: User feedback helps you prioritize features and projects, ensuring you’re building products that meet customer needs and expectations.
Enhanced customer satisfaction: By incorporating user feedback, you can demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction, leading to increased loyalty and retention.
Increased efficiency: Integrating user feedback can streamline your product development process, reducing the need for costly rework and revisions.
To collect and integrate user feedback, you can use tools like Featurebase, which allows users to vote on ideas, comment on feedback, and get notified when you update a feature. You can also use Productlane’s feedback hub, which provides a centralized repository for user feedback, allowing you to link feedback with projects and issues from Linear.
Implementing and Optimizing Your Roadmap
Implementing and optimizing your roadmap is critical for achieving your product development goals. By regularly reviewing and updating your roadmap, you can ensure it remains aligned with your business objectives, customer needs, and market trends. Here are some key benefits of implementing and optimizing your roadmap:
Improved alignment: Regularly reviewing and updating your roadmap ensures it remains aligned with your business objectives, customer needs, and market trends.
Increased efficiency: Optimizing your roadmap can help streamline your product development process, reducing waste and improving productivity.
Better decision-making: A well-implemented and optimized roadmap provides valuable insights and data to inform product development decisions.
To implement and optimize your roadmap, you can use tools like SteelSync, which provides a real-time, cohesive board for centralizing client requests, communication, project updates, and roadmaps. You can also use Productlane’s Linear sync engine, which keeps your roadmap continuously updated, ensuring it remains aligned with your Linear projects and issues.
Unlocking the Full Potential of Linear
Unlocking the full potential of Linear requires integrating it with other tools and workflows to create a seamless product development process. By leveraging Linear’s capabilities and integrating it with other tools, you can streamline your workflow, improve collaboration, and build better products. Here are some key benefits of unlocking the full potential of Linear:
Improved collaboration: Integrating Linear with other tools and workflows can facilitate collaboration among team members, stakeholders, and customers.
Increased efficiency: Leveraging Linear’s capabilities and integrating it with other tools can streamline your product development process, reducing waste and improving productivity.
Better product development: Unlocking the full potential of Linear can help you build products that meet customer needs and expectations.
To unlock the full potential of Linear, you can use tools like Productlane, which combines a lightning-fast support tool with a public Linear roadmap, feedback hub, and changelog. You can also use Featurebase, which integrates with Linear to automatically create and sync a public version of your roadmap.
A more scalable way to create a Public Roadmap with Linear (automatically 🔥)
Linear has a strong directory of official integrations to increase the overall Linear Experience ❤️ SteelSync is part of them now. How it works?
After you sign up, select your team and projects to create a shareable board, initiating real-time issue synchronization.
Sharing the board grants stakeholders real-time access to current in-progress Kanban, view issues, submit requests to the triage section, and see upcoming project updates and releases, contingent upon your permissions. You’ll also be able to create an automatically synced public roadmap and personalize all your boards with icons and colors.
🎁 Make each board Private with an access code or Public.
And now it’s becoming very transparent and scalable, for example, you can see above a snapshot of our public roadmap for accessible through our Public Board view. Automatically sync from our Linear data 🔥
Create board views based on Linear Teams and Projects, automatically sync your public roadmap within their board, and share this private/public board view URL with your stakeholders. You can also host the roadmap on your own domain for better customization and branding.
Enjoy, I hope this article will help you.
François - Founder
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