Share Now-Next-Later Roadmaps with Your Customers

Making customers users aware what’s coming next isn’t just courtesy. It’s an important part of market retention strategy, especially in B2B SaaS. When customers can see what’s ahead, they plan their adoption, integrations, and internal builds around your roadmap instead of guessing. That builds trust, and trust is sticky. A customer who knows that one of the features they need is shipping soon is probably not going to shop around with your competitors, or try building workarounds in the meantime.

Votito makes it easy to create roadmaps that you can securely share with your clients, or publish on your website. See the Now Next Later Roadmap Example for a sample of how the final result looks when published.

This guide explains how to create and publish roadmaps easily. It takes about 10 minutes to set up everything once, and after that the roadmap automatically updates.

• Choosing the right roadmap format
• Publishing Now-Next-Later roadmaps in Votito
  • Step 1: Create an Idea Bank
  • Step 2: Add items for your roadmap
  • Step 3: Label items for the roadmap
  • Step 4: Publish the roadmap
• Sharing the roadmap with your users

Choosing the right roadmap format

When people think about roadmaps, what mostly comes to their minds are list of features with specific dates. This is problematic for longer time horizons because it commits you to a specific solution. To focus on the things needed now, you probably won’t have time to evaluate in detail things needed far ahead. Committing to specific solutions without sufficient research is dangerous, and can lead to disappointment. And even if you do enough research for future items so you can commit to them, the market needs and opportunities might change before the feature is ready. The roadmap format you select should allow you to be more specific about things that will be available shortly, and less specific about things you plan in the future, while still allowing customers to peek into your plans.

Now-Next-Later roadmaps, created by Janna Bastow, are a great way to satisfy both those needs. (Check out our Knowledge Base article on NNL Roadmaps for more detail). They split the information into three time horizons (Now, Next and Later), and allow you to provide different levels of detail and certainty about different items.

Each item on the map has 3 important parts:

• The central thing in each item is the “Problem to solve” - not a specific solution, but a specific problem. This keeps the roadmap focused on customer needs, pains and opportunities. Focusing on a problem as the key element of each item makes it relateable for a larger part of the prospect awareness scale, even those that may have not been aware of a specific problem or those that might have had some other specific solution in mind.
• Next, there’s a specific idea for solving the problem. This would be a feature, widget, or a function of your product that can help address the issue.
• Third, there are specific product goals that solving the problem achieves. They explain to your stakeholders why this item is on the roadmap for a specific time frame.

For example, in a data analytics product, a potential problem to solve for customers might be to help them easily explore data from past research experiments. There could be lots of ways of doing that, including building dashboards and querying functions, or just letting customers export the data and then process it using some kind of third-party dashboard. From a business perspective, solving this problem reduces support costs (reducing the need for customers to request custom reports through support channels). It also helps with large customer retention, as they can do more with our product.

An important aspect of creating NNL roadmaps is that different people should be able to see different types of information. The problem you’re solving and the idea for the solution is just one part of the Value Exchange Loop. It’s how the product will deliver value to the market. The product goals complete the loop, showing how you plan to capture the value from the market, but this information is probably not relevant for your customers (or even should not be visible to them at all). When a customer is looking at the roadmap, they should not care (or even know) that we’re doing this in order to reduce our costs.

Publishing Now-Next-Later roadmaps in Votito

In Votito, the basic container for ideas is an Idea Bank. You can create a public roadmap from any Idea Bank in Votito, including existing idea banks that collect feature requests or suggestions. Regardless of the idea bank type you use, only specific items you select will be in the roadmap, so there is no risk of publishing something accidentally.

Step 1: Create an Idea Bank

If you do not yet have an Idea Bank, create one specifically for your roadmap following the instructions below. If you already have an idea bank you want to use, skip to step 2.

1. Open your Idea Bank Dashboard and sign-in if requried

2. Click the “New Idea Bank” button in the top-right corner

   

3. Give the idea bank a title - this would usually be the name of the product you are building the roadmap for. It will appear as the heading on the public idea bank page.

   

4. If you are making the idea bank just for a public roadmap, select “Internal” access. This means that only you can add items to the idea bank. Other access levels allow your users to potentially suggest or vote for new ideas.
5. Click “Create Idea Bank”

You can change all this information later, so you do not have to worry about getting it exactly right.

Step 2: Add items for your roadmap

You can now add items to your idea bank. In the Votito jargon, they are called “Proposals”. For existing idea banks, you may already have some ideas that your customers proposed. If yes, then skip to step 3. For a new idea bank, or if the items you want to publish are not yet in the idea bank, follow the instructions below:

1. Click the “Add proposal” button on your Idea Bank management page.

   

2. Enter the proposal title. Use the key heading you want to show in the roadmap. For NNL roadmaps, this would typically be the problem you want to solve, not a specific feature implementation. Continuing the example above, this would be “Easily explore data from past research”.

3. Enter the proposal description. This is usually more information explaining the proposal in detail for readers. In case of items for NNL roadmaps, you probably want to put information on concrete ideas for solving the issue. Continuing the example above, this would be “Self-service API for exporting key workspace data, including metrics and logs”.

   

4. Click “Submit Proposal” to add a new roadmap item to your idea bank.

Continue adding other proposals and ideas that should be in your roadmap.

Note that you can use basic markdown formatting instructions when editing the proposal description. That way you can add more information and details on things coming soon (e.g. links to documentation or structuring the content with headings and paragraphs), and keep the information on items coming in the future lighter.

Step 3: Label items for the roadmap

Next, you need to decide for each proposal where it belongs on the roadmap (now, next or later). To do that in Votito, we use tags. Tags are free-form textual annotations on proposal items, that are usually useful for grouping. Click the + Tag button in the proposal page header to add a new tag.

Tags are also useful to label proposals with product goals. We recommend adding some kind of prefix on goal tags (e.g. GOAL:).

Idea Banks in Votito help you manage proposals at different stages of the lifecycle, from draft ideas to implementation (see proposal statuses help page for more information). A newly added proposal will not automatically show in the roadmap. Instead, you can explicitly decide which items should be visible. To make an item visible in the roadmap, you need to accept it. This is useful, for example, when you have an open idea bank and stakeholders or users can submit proposals themselves - you do not want those to automatically appear in the roadmap. Marking a proposal as accepted shows you’re committing to it.

Step 4: Publish the roadmap

Once you’ve tagged and accepted the proposals, make the roadmap available to the public.

1. Go back to the idea bank management screen, click on the ... more menu in the top-right corner, and select Change Access Level.

   

2. Toggle the “Enable public roadmap” option, and click “Configure” next to it.

   

3. Proposals in a roadmap will be grouped by tags, so add the tags for roadmap segmentation in the configuration section. For Now/Next/Later roadmaps, add the “Now”, “Next” and “Later” tags.

   

4. The tags will show in the roadmap sorted by priority. If you added them in a different order, reorder the tags before committing. Once you added all three tags, click “Save”.

   

5. The dialog will close, and you will see a new section in the idea bank management screen, showing the public URL. Click “Copy” to copy the URL to your clipboard.

   

Sharing the roadmap with your users

Try opening the URL in a browser, it should show the roadmap with the items you accepted. Check out a live example of how the sample roadmap looks like.

The URL is secure, not open to search engines or the public unless you explicitly share it with them. This page is updated automatically with new proposals or changes to existing ideas in your idea bank, so you can now share it with your audience, or embed in your web site.

Note that the goal tags did not show on the public roadmap. Goals are visible to you and your team internally, because we have not added the goal tags to the roadmap configuration.