Free Project Roadmap Templates

A project roadmap is a high-level, easy-to-understand overview of the important pieces of a project. It’s a resource that you can share with anyone to provide a quick snapshot of the work’s aims, important milestones, key deliverables, dependencies, and possible risks.

The project manager compiles the project roadmap and uses it as a key communication tool prior to and during project kickoff to set appropriate expectations, share high-level plans, and highlight important components of the work to come.

With the right stakeholders and project contributors at the table, the simple, graphical nature of a project roadmap helps set the stage for a successful project. Essentially, it should be an easy-to-digest infographic that communicates the most critical details of your project to any interested parties.

It is also important to note what project roadmap is not:

• A Project Plan: While it can be connected to a product roadmap, a project plan is the backbone of your project once activities are underway. The critical components that make up a highly functional project plan (such as resource management, start and finish dates, and critical path) are too detailed to include in your project roadmap.
• A Project Charter: A project charter is an excellent tool to keep your project team and key stakeholders on the same page, working toward the same goal and operating from the same playbook. While it may share elements with your charter, the project roadmap is effective for working with a wider audience and should be approached from that angle.
• A Resource Management Tool: It is important to see how your resources are allocated across one project or multiple projects, and every team should have a method to make sure its people are working on the right areas (and aren’t overextended). However, this level of detail is too in-depth for your project roadmap. Your project roadmap can include key contacts working on your project, but even that can be too much information.
• A Product Roadmap: A product roadmap provides information about a development-specific undertaking (one with an end product) and is typically more detailed than a project roadmap. We’ll explain more about the differences between the two below.
• A Backlog or a List of Features: Though a project roadmap does include key deliverables, it is much more than a to-do list. A backlog and features list simply itemize and prioritize unmet needs, but a project roadmap is a visual tool that also includes high-level goals, deliverables, a timeline, etc.
• A Project Management Tracker: Teams often use a project management tracker to maintain scheduling over the course of a project. A project roadmap is much less detailed and merely offers a rough timeline that can change as the project evolves.
• An Epic: In Agile methodologies, an epic is a large chunk of work (including multiple tasks) that shares one common objective. By contrast, a project roadmap can outline multiple goals, and it includes the supporting information outlined below.

Although the project manager will usually create the project roadmap, team members, internal and external stakeholders, customers, and product owners and managers also use it.

A project roadmap is appropriate for many types of projects, including the following:

• Marketing plan or project
• IT strategy
• Sales
• Strategy development
• New business development
• Technology project
• Project portfolio management

Though this article mainly focuses on project roadmaps in enterprise, they are also found in other industries, such as education or healthcare.