6 New Whiteboard Templates To Start Building Your Product Roadmap
Editor's note: Aha! Notebooks (referenced here as Aha! Create) has been split into Aha! Knowledge and Aha! Whiteboards.
We have been busy delivering new whiteboard capabilities to help you visualize your early-stage plans — including tables, timelines, and progress bars. But designing a roadmap from a blank canvas can still be time-consuming work. So we created a set of beautiful whiteboard templates to help product managers everywhere craft a visual roadmap in minutes. This is a great approach if you are not already using a sophisticated roadmap planning tool like Aha! Roadmaps.
You can now showcase your roadmap on a whiteboard in Aha! Create — choosing from six popular templates to match your needs.
Navigate to the new Roadmap category in the whiteboard template library. Here, you will find options for everything from communicating your overall product strategy to highlighting the timing of releases, epics, and features. These templates were handcrafted by Aha! experts based on many years of experience helping product teams build lovable software. Each template comes with advice on best practices and an inspirational example to help you shine.
Customize each template to your liking. Then share your whiteboard with the team and refine the details together — in real time or asynchronously. When you are ready to build a formal delivery plan, seamlessly convert whiteboard objects into Aha! Roadmaps. This makes it easy to quickly visualize your thoughts and then capture features that are ready for product development.
Here is a closer look at the new whiteboard templates:
Product roadmap: Communicate your product direction
Visualize your overall product strategy. Highlight your strategic initiatives and then plan out the key epics and features needed to achieve them. Share your roadmap with company leaders, internal teams, and even customers to gain alignment — easily adjusting the details as needed.
Strategic roadmap: Visualize the high-level plan
Show what you want to achieve and how you will get there. This template is ideal for displaying the timeline of your major initiatives and the new areas of functionality you will implement to support each one. Use it to rally your team around your product strategy before you go deeper into the planning details.
Portfolio roadmap: Showcase work across your portfolio
Lay out your portfolio plans in a single view. Set the roadmap timeline and add a swim lane for each of your products or product lines. Then capture the high-level initiatives for each product and show the timing of releases. This view is great for aligning plans across different business units, divisions, or teams in your organization.
Release roadmap: Coordinate dates, deliverables, and dependencies
Use this Gantt-style roadmap to plan major product launches. Visualize the key phases of work that need to happen, highlight important milestones, and identify cross-team dependencies. Share the plan with other teams — such as engineering, marketing, sales, and support — to ensure everyone knows what needs to happen and when.
Epics roadmap: Prioritize work across multiple releases
Create an epics roadmap to show how you plan to deliver value to customers. Visualize upcoming releases and include the epics that will be completed in each one. Include the overall goals that each release supports to share how you are moving your product strategy forward.