Your product teams are doing great discovery work. The problem is that it lives in five different places.
Each team has its own Jira Product Discovery (JPD) space. Each space has its own views. And when leadership asks, "What's everyone working on, and how does it tie to our goals?", someone ends up stitching together screenshots and links.
JPD roadmaps fix that. They pull ideas from multiple spaces into a single view, so you get a true bird's-eye picture of discovery across your organization.
In a recent walkthrough, I showed how roadmaps work, how to configure them, and where they deliver the most value. Watch the full video here, or keep reading for the breakdown.
Siloed planning is expensive. According to Atlassian, Fortune 500 companies lose an estimated 25 billion hours a year to ineffective collaboration.
A lot of that waste starts in discovery. When teams can't see each other's ideas, you get:
That last one is a big deal. Pendo found that 80% of features in the average software product are rarely or never used. Better cross-team discovery is one of the most direct ways to avoid becoming part of that statistic. It also helps product managers stop taking orders and reclaim the roadmap.
Roadmaps are a feature of Jira Product Discovery that live in their own section of the left-hand navigation. If you use Plans in Jira, the concept will feel familiar. Both give you visibility across multiple spaces.
Inside a roadmap, you can create multiple views using the same view types you already know from your JPD spaces. That includes lists, boards, timelines, matrices, and tree views. If your spaces aren't set up yet, start with our complete guide to Jira Product Discovery setup.
Roadmaps are only available on the Premium tier of JPD. Factor that into your licensing plans before you build your rollout around them. If you're weighing an upgrade, Sketch offers a free Atlassian licensing review.
Here's where roadmaps and Plans part ways:
That's convenient. It also means anyone with edit access is changing live data. Set permissions accordingly (more on that below).
There are five ways to view your roadmaps. Some of this comes down to preference, but some views are better than others depending on what you need to see.
The list view is the simplest starting point. Group by space, and each team becomes a collapsible section, almost like swim lanes.
From one screen, you can answer questions like:
You can add the fields you need to the list, with one caveat covered below.
Board views work well for Now/Next/Later roadmaps. In my example in the video, ideas from two spaces are grouped by goals. That shows both where each idea sits in the roadmap and how it rolls up to a business goal.
You can switch the grouping back to space anytime. Groupings are collapsible, which keeps things readable as you add more teams.
The timeline view gives you a cross-team quarterly picture, grouped by space. You control the timeline start and end dates, so you can zoom out to two years or tighten things up to two quarters for a more focused view.
One gotcha: edits to ideas save automatically. Changes to the view itself only save automatically when autosave is on. In the video demo linked above, autosave was off, so he had to save the view for everyone after changing the timeline range. If your view changes aren't sticking, turn on autosave or save the view for everyone.
Matrix views are also available in roadmaps. They're useful for plotting ideas against two criteria, such as effort and impact, across every team in one place.
The tree view shows how ideas roll up through multiple levels of hierarchy, across spaces. In the video demo, you can see how two ideas from two different spaces roll up to a single custom "opportunity" idea type, which then rolls up to an Atlassian goal.
That's the kind of traceability executives want: a clear line from team-level ideas to company-level outcomes.
Tree view also requires JPD Premium. Sketch has a separate video dedicated to the tree view if you want to go deeper.
This is the caveat that trips teams up most often:
Roadmaps can only use JPD system fields and global fields. Space-level custom fields won't appear in your roadmap views.
If your teams have each built their own custom fields for scoring, effort, or priority, those won't carry over. Before you build a roadmap, audit your fields and decide which ones should be standardized as global fields.
This is also a good moment to step back and ask whether your teams are measuring ideas consistently. If one team scores impact on a 1 to 5 scale and another uses 1 to 10, a combined view won't tell leadership much.
Just like regular JPD views, any roadmap view can be published. Click the Publish button at the top, choose who can access it, and share a read-only link.
The best part: published views can be made available to unlicensed JPD users. That means leadership, sales, support, and other stakeholders can see what's in discovery without needing a JPD seat.
Open the three-dot menu and select Roadmap settings. From there you can:
Because edits save straight back to ideas, tight edit permissions are worth the extra minute of setup.
Build one roadmap that covers every team or JPD space. Leaders get a holistic view of what's being explored and how it contributes to company themes and goals. For a real-world example, see how Sketch helped a health enterprise unify product intake with Jira Product Discovery.
Compare ideas side by side across teams. Spot overlaps, uncover collaboration opportunities, and make better calls on what to work on next.
Instead of sending stakeholders to separate views in separate spaces, give them one roadmap with several views. One location. One link. Less chasing.
Setup isn't horribly difficult. If you follow these nine steps, you should be in good shape:
Of course, you might benefit from further fine-tuning, but these simple steps will get you off to a good start. You can always call us if you get stuck or have questions.
Roadmaps are powerful, but they only work as well as the structure underneath them. Field strategy, idea hierarchy, permissions, and licensing all need to line up.
That's where Sketch Development comes in. As an Atlassian Solutions Partner, we help organizations with Atlassian consulting, licensing, and training across the full suite of products. Our 100% US-based team has supported Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups alike.
And when discovery turns into building, we can help there too. Sketch embeds custom software development teams to build the right AI-enabled software and equip your team to run it.
Ready to bring your product teams onto one roadmap? Reach out to talk with our Atlassian experts. For more how-tos, browse the Sketch blog.
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No. Roadmaps are only available on the Premium tier of Jira Product Discovery. The tree view also requires Premium.
Both provide cross-space visibility. The big difference is saving. Plans require you to commit changes back to Jira. JPD roadmaps save edits to ideas automatically.
Only if they're global fields. Roadmaps support JPD system fields and global fields. Space-level custom fields aren't supported.
Yes. You can publish roadmap views as read-only links and make them available to unlicensed users, such as executives and other stakeholders.
Changes to a view, like the timeline date range, only save automatically when autosave is on. If it's off, save the view for everyone after making changes.
Yes. Roadmap settings let you apply a filter across every view, using either basic mode or advanced mode (JQL).