New roadmap enhancements in Zenhub

Since its initial launch, Zenhub roadmaps has been the go-to place for product managers, product owners, executives, and stakeholders to get transparency on where their products are headed. 

Over the past several months, elevating the roadmaps experience has been a key focus for our product team, and we’ve spent hours speaking with our users to get their input on how we can make roadmaps even better. Through those conversations, several themes emerged:

• The need for greater visibility into blocked work
• Streamlined exporting and sharing capabilities
• The ability to use roadmaps for planning (not just visualizing committed work)

Today, we’re excited to share two brand new features that deliver on your requests for greater visibility and transparency into committed work—key dates and dependencies. You can learn more about both features below, and head over to Zenhub to explore them now.

As part of this release, we’re also excited to share more about our upcoming plans to transform Zenhub roadmaps into a planning solution with the upcoming launch of versions and drafts and enhanced exporting options. Keep reading for a sneak peek into what’s coming.

Key dates: an easier way to flag important dates

One of the standout features we’re launching today is the introduction of key dates. Previously, there was no way to flag notable milestones within a Project or Epic’s timeline. With key dates, users can easily add custom annotations, providing a visual indicator on the roadmap. These annotations can span across all Projects and Epics or be contained within a specific Epic. 

Key dates are an excellent way for product owners to remind developers and stakeholders of important dates like sprint reviews, holidays, and project milestones. At Zenhub, we’ve already been leveraging key dates to mark important team events like bug bashes and marketing releases for new features and functionality we’re bringing to our users.

To add key dates, simply navigate to the Epic or Project of your choice and select “Key Dates” under “Timeline” on the right navigation bar. 

Dependency views on the roadmap

While Zenhub Epics already supported dependencies, today, we’re enhancing this feature and bringing it to the roadmap, so your team can visually indicate (through arrows) dependencies between Epics. Teams previously couldn’t see this information at a glance, causing a lack of visibility around blocked work. Now, blockers are apparent at every level. 

To see dependencies on the roadmap, simply add a “Dependency” between two Epics. If your team has already created dependencies between Epics, they’ll appear automatically on your roadmap as of today. 

Plan your roadmap with versions and drafts [coming soon]

Today, teams are planning different versions of their roadmap in separate tools like Aha!, ProductBoard, Roadmunk, or even spreadsheets. While those solutions are good for planning, they’re detached from where the work is actually tracked. This means roadmaps are often disconnected from the code and require manual transfer from these tools to Zenhub.

This won’t be the case for long. Coming soon, project managers and product owners can create draft versions of roadmaps, enabling them to be edited and worked on privately before those changes are published to the live roadmap. This provides a space for strategizing and refining priorities without causing confusion or misalignment. 

As an added bonus, it also means your team can ditch those separate roadmapping tools and bring the entire planning and tracking process into Zenhub! 

Improved exporting/sharing [coming soon]

Roadmap visibility is key to effective communication, and sometimes, that happens outside of Zenhub. Coming soon, we’re making it possible to export Zenhub roadmaps as PNG and CSV files so that Zenhub roadmaps are even easier to share. This is perfect for when your team is preparing a presentation or document and needs to embed roadmap images. 

Final thoughts

These exciting new features are set to redefine the way teams plan and visualize their projects within Zenhub. Whether you want to provide more visibility with key dates, flag potential blockers with dependencies, make sharing easier with exporting or look forward to the strategic flexibility offered by versions/drafts, we’re committed to making your roadmapping experience better than ever. 

If you haven’t started using roadmaps yet, we’d love to connect and give you and your team a custom tour so you can see our roadmaps in action. Talk to a Zenhub expert here.