Customers are the lifeblood of every business. However, the journey does not begin there. It starts with the process of building goods and services using dependable roadmapping tools.
Accompanied by a portfolio management tool, you can check out growth possibilities and risks by looking at all operations you and your team can provide.
To help you get started on your path to success, we've compiled a list of the top 5 best roadmap tools to consider and some related topics to familiarize yourself with.
What Is a Roadmapping Tool?
If you're unfamiliar with roadmapping tools, this should give you an idea. They are comprehensive schematics that encapsulate and illustrate your company project's core strategy and goals. Often in a graphic format, they may be used to develop, review, and distribute projects to the rest of your team members.
This is when portfolio management tools come into play after completing a project. They are intended to assist teams in tracking and managing projects in accomplishing the set goals within the time frame. It also helps team members collaborate and accelerate projects to fulfill the set restrictions.
What Is the Roadmapping Process?
Roadmapping is the systematic process of setting the efforts, procedures, and resources required to turn a vision into action. In other words, you plot everything you need to make your project go live. This is a product manager's responsibility, together with her team, most of the time.
What Is the Best Roadmapping Tool?
Some of the best roadmapping tools do not stand alone. Usually, they come with the best portfolio management tools to provide a complete guide towards your success. Here are our top 5 who fit the role:
#1 Craft.io
Craft.io is one of the leading project portfolio management tools that includes capabilities for noting feedback, workflow planning, and even providing roadmapping tools. You may set product specifications, prioritize and communicate crucial choices, and control workload bandwidth for your team.
Craft.io consolidates and collects fragmented product data and sets out comprehensive roadmapping and portfolio management tools. It keeps track of all product information from stakeholder and team member comments to Objective and Key Results (OKR). It also offers thematic strategy documents that you and your team can oversee.
When it comes to managing projects and strategies, Craft.io has it all. So far, you can expect sharing and collaboration options, several roadmap views, progress tracking, and customized and more shareable approaches to see your materials under one roof.
Small-scale businesses may be overwhelmed by its plethora of functions. However, it will be much easier to use after they get the hang of it.
Core Features and Advantages
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Offers team-accessible roadmapping tools and portfolio management tools
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Easy to customize and friendly interface for beginners
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Complete set of collaborative tools
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Works with other productivity platforms
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Different templates to choose from
#2 airfocus
airfocus provides a contemporary and adaptable product management platform. It offers a comprehensive solution for product teams to sort out and communicate strategies and approaches, prioritize work, create roadmaps, and link feedback to address issues.
This roadmapping tool and project management solution was built with flexibility. Thus, allowing you to swiftly adjust the platform to meet your needs without disturbing your usual duties.
airfocus provides specialized PM applications that aid in the resolution of fairly specific product management issues, including prioritizing workflows and feedback collection. But with interconnected workspaces, they also make it simple to interact across teams, products, and units.
You may leverage their integration features to extend its capabilities completely. The disadvantage is that these connections may only be offered in advanced plans. Nonetheless, airfocus remains one of the most adaptable product management platforms for your team's operations.
Core Features and Advantages
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Offers a scalable, straightforward, and simple interface that suits beginners
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You may design your own set of custom views and fields.
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Flexible project management tools to build everything that matches your business goals
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Provides simple solutions to organize and transmit project strategies
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Customer support in case the need arises
#3 Zoho Sprints
Zoho Sprints is a product management platform that lets your team plan, track, and launch the highest quality products and services possible for your clients. Besides that, it also assists in keeping the roadmap process and backlogs structured and visible.
Living up to its name, sprint planning is made easier using a drag-and-drop planning interface. You may easily shift work items from the product backlog to the sprint backlog. But this is all made possible by their extensively customizable project board.
This tool can guide you through the interdependencies of their release cycles, from planning to deployment. As project managers, you may use configurable reports and dashboards to track overall developments being made.
Communication and cooperation are essential in all aspects of life. But they are especially important when working with cross-functional teams to create goods for your consumers. Product teams in Zoho Sprints may engage within the context of their work using features such as built-in chat, virtual meetings, and an interactive project feed.
Core Features and Advantages
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Easily plan, track, and release products and services
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Supports roadmapping tools and processes
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Easy-to-use interface to easily shift work items
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Customizable project board
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Can allow WIP limit-setting and over 15 native integrations
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Covers project management, communication, and collaboration tools
#4 Roadmunk
Roadmunk is a roadmapping tool that allows you to create flexible roadmaps to meet your specific needs. It is based on three different sorts of roadmaps. The first is a "Timeline," which resembles a typical roadmap. Initiatives, objectives, and projects are all visible.
The "Swimlane" is the second viewpoint. This is simply a Kanban board that provides a more simplified perspective for your teams. It's ideal for Agile teams.
The "Master" viewpoint is the third. This comprehensive view allows you to integrate numerous roadmaps into a single master roadmap. This provides a bird's eye view on the outlook of your products and services.
The option for several teams to create their roadmaps and then combine them in the master view is unique to Roadmunk. When it comes to distributing your roadmap, you may do so by creating multiple perspectives of the same plan and then sharing them with different stakeholders. It may be published as PNG slides or hosted online.
However, because Roadmunk focuses solely on roadmapping, you'll need to rely on other tools to collect input and develop plans.
Core Features and Advantages
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Focuses on three main roadmap phases
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Provides comprehensive timeline, kanban board, and master viewpoint
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Ensures that you get to see what your future projects may look like
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Lets you share your roadmaps within your teams and with other people
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Different ways of publishing roadmaps
#5 Portfoleon
Portfoleon is the right mix of portfolio management and roadmapping tools. It allows teams to coordinate on strategic plans and relate to organizational objectives and timelines. They offer solutions ideal for teams and organizations that handle several projects and initiatives simultaneously.
So if you do not want to deal with the complexity of standard project portfolio management tools, Portfoleon got your back. More than that, the platform also integrates key aspects in gaining senior management support through three important things visible on their service. The first is feasibility, next is efficiency. But the most important is the relevance of your ideas to the company's strategic goals.
If you feel that you wish to connect strategy to execution through projects, Porfoleon has the necessary features for you.
Features
No one perspective or graphic can illustrate every facet of your portfolio at once. To interact with various stakeholders, you will present different subsets of your data in multiple formats. Portfoleon allows you to effortlessly transmit information without keeping tabs on multiple things.
From its one data source with unlimited boards, you can get:
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A fully configurable timeline displays the project theme, team size, priority, or any other component of your roadmap.
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A spreadsheet view that allows you to update your data. Then, copy and paste them to and from Excel or Google Sheets and import CSV files.
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Pivot tables and charts allow you to undertake rapid online portfolio analysis and communicate it with your stakeholders.
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Kanban boards let you color-code your portfolio items and modify cards, columns, and swimlanes.
In terms of collaboration, you and your team can:
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Share your boards with colleagues who use Portfoleon or anybody else by providing them with a private link. Select if you want read-only, read-write, or admin access.
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Gather project status updates, notify project managers, and prepare summary reports.
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Utilize dependencies to allow everyone to control individual projects while maintaining fully mediated integrity.
Other features include:
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If-This-Then-That Rules: You may wish to add some more features to Portfoleon from time to time to become even more efficient. You may further tweak Portfoleon's behavior with a simple "if this then that" rule. From this, you can get an automated data population and send email notifications and reminders.
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Resource management: It is critical to understand who is working on what when managing a portfolio. Portfoleon delivers resource management and analysis features to help you solve your projects-priorities-resource conundrum.
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For advanced use-cases: While it is true that this project management tool with roadmapping capabilities is easy to use, the software architecture underlying this simplicity allows for far more complex use when required. In this case, you get a draft/publish system, portfolio history, and integration API.
Overall, Portfoleon guarantees a quick yet reliable boost to your project strategies. This lean product roadmapping tool and project portfolio management software comprise features that come with simplicity to give you solid assistance to stay on top of whatever project you have in mind.
Pros
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Portfoleon focuses only on strategic aspects. It does not try to be the all-in-one software that handles projects, tasks, roadmaps, personnel, documents, etc. Portfoleon is only about strategic planning and follow-up.
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The user interface of Portfoleon focuses on visualization, as opposed to calculations and automated decision-making.
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Visually represents data to have meaningful discussions, explore options, and make decisions.
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Encourages dialogue and connects your team.
Cons
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Task distribution could be better.
Project portfolio management is sometimes seen as a costly and challenging task that requires mountains of paperwork, high-priced consultants, and only makes sense in large enterprises. However, Portfoleon ought to change that narrative. You can see it for yourself when you request a demo now.
The Best Roadmapping Tools
Roadmapping tools may be highly beneficial to any project manager, including you. Only a handful, though, may live up to your expectations. Fortunately, roadmapping solutions with project management tools help make it more helpful than ever.
When it comes to simple roadmap and project management solutions that focus on strategic aspects, we recommend Portfoleon. For a comprehensive roadmapping solution, Craft.io and airfocus fit the role. But you can also take your chances with Zoho Sprints and Roadmunk.