I thought of jotting down a few inputs for the roadmap feature in Zenhub. If there is a better way to do it please let me know.
Dependency tracking is a must for any roadmap or gantt chart like feature in a project management suite. Please could you add this asap, its painful manual work to align the dates for several dependencies when you have to do it.
The roadmap can get pretty long before you realise it, can we please enable adding sorting and filtering on that screen to make it usable when it happens.
Can we include more hierarchy in the roadmap, right now I cannot see epics under epics, this is a common usecase for us when planning bigger features that contribute to a key result for example that is represented as an epic.
Make the epics on the roadmap appear in a slide out when clicked rather than open in new tabs also make the epics editable from that screen, like labels, estimates , etc…
Could you make the panes resizable especially when the epic names are bigger. Allows you to see more of it without having to hover over each one.
Laura here from the Product Team. Thanks for taking the time to share all this feedback!
To start, I’ll give some general thoughts: these are excellent points, and a few of these items we’ve actually heard from other users as well (e.g. dependency & sprint tracking, and ability to sort or re-order items in the Roadmap). The short answer is that we are planning on making some improvements/optimizations to the roadmap in the new year, but we don’t yet have a firm timeline I can share. I’ve added these pieces of feedback to include as we start unpacking this project. I do have some good news though - we recently added the ability to have epics appear in a slide out on the roadmap
Regarding where to share feedback and product requests, usually our product roadmap here is the best place to do it. Our product managers, including myself, go through every single piece of feedback in order to understand and categorize it. This feedback helps with the prioritization of features, as well as the design and development phase once we’ve committed to building it. It also means we can reach out to the users who submitted the feedback to see if they’d like to be involved in the design (e.g. participate in usability tests or beta programs). Or we can just reach out to let them know their requested feature is live.
I like and agree with a lot of the points rk9 brought up here, especially:
Adding dependencies to the roadmap, and to have them be adjustable together (e.g. Epic A ends Jan 1, Epic B is dependent on Epic A and is 4 weeks long so is automatically given a start date of Jan 2 and end date of Jan 31 —> I update/move Epic A to end on Jan 31, and this should automatically update the Epic B start date to Feb 1 and end date to Mar 2, etc.)
Sorting (manual, by start date, by end date) of roadmap objects and their nested objects.
Epics all the way down - be able to expand Epics on the Roadmap into their sub-epics.
I also wanted to add a couple more requests of my own that are very important to how we’re trying to leverage Roadmaps:
Project descriptions - I want to be able to add descriptions and hyperlinks to the Project object so that someone can click the project on the roadmap to get information about it without having to dig into the epics within it.
Sharing direct link to image of roadmap - I want to be able to show other parts of our company a read-only/image version of the roadmap that they can inspect but not alter.
Sharing image of/direct link to roadmap without expanding and showing the epics within - I want to show other parts of our company just the high level objectives/Projects so they can know what we’re working on without having to dig through the epics making up the project since those are more focused on actual engineering work and not necessary for someone from Sales or Marketing to see in detail.
Custom coloring of Projects/Epics - I want to implement my own color scheme on roadmap objects so that I can indicate information to viewers about project status (like “In Development”, “Closed Beta”, “Open Beta”, etc.)
Looking forward to seeing this feature grow! I’ll submit feature requests for these as well, using the link that Laura provided, thanks!
to add on the Roadmap topic, the new beta projects from Github added a lot of new features (custom fields, list views, multi repo kanban…) and that the one great differentiator with Zenhub is the roadmap view. I like the roadmap view but it is hard to use it efficiently:
It is hard:
to set start and end date (sometime we only have duration estimates and dependencies)
to order properly items in a project (right now I’m abusing the remove and add Epic to end up in the order I want the epic to show up)
to fold/unfold epics containing epics (I’d like to have a toggle to do that automatically, right now I have to find the child epics and add them to the project and I have the order problem mentioned just above
maybe I’m missing something or not using roadmap correctly?
