Creating, maintaining and communicating product roadmaps is one of the key responsibilities of a Product Manager. Needless to say, “there is an app for that”. Well not one app – quite a few, and not apps but rather quite sophisticated software solutions. In this article you will find a quick overview of several product roadmap software solutions (we will post more detailed reviews of these solutions in the near future):
- Aha!
- Atlassian Roadmap Planner Plugin
- Innovate Now
- Interstate
- ProdPad
- Product Plan
- Roadmunk
- VersionOne
DISCLAIMER: we have not yet played with these solutions and out of necessity have to use information and marketing copy available on their websites without verification. So please don’t be surprised to see a lot of quotes below. This list is ordered alphabetically.
Aha!
Aha! is “the one product management tool you need to lead product with conviction and be happy doing it. If you are like most product managers, Aha! is what you have always wanted to replace the Word, Google, Excel, Dropbox, and PPT docs that are scattered all over your hard drive and the cloud.” The key features include:
- Strategy: business planning, building a business model, tracking goals, aligning strategic initiatives, monitoring competition, highlighting the value of releases
- Release planning and management
- Idea management including crowdsourcing of ideas, engaging the community, promoting ideas to features
- Feature management including organising features by release and priority, managing the workflows, incorporating design
- Sophisticated reporting
- Publishing notebooks
- Managing users
- Integrations with Jira, Visual Studio, Pivotal Tracker, GitHub, Slack, Hipchat, Dropbox and many other solutions
Free trial is available. Pricing starts with US $59 per user per month (even cheaper if you qualify for a Startup Pack).
Atlassian Roadmap Planner Plugin
The Roadmap Planner Macro for Atlassian’s Confluence is “for creating light-weight product and team roadmaps, as well as visualizing timelines for your team’s projects”. Key features include:
- Timeline-based planning
- Adjusting and sharing plans
- Connecting Confluence pages with the timeline
- Team collaboration
Innovate Now
Innovate Now is a tool for innovation, product management, agile development. Key features groups include:
Ideas & Innovation:
- innovation canvas and prioritisation
- smart note taking
- Chrome browser integration
- collaboration
- linkages with product portfolios
Product Management:
- roadmapping
- product backlog
- release planning and management
- product portfolios
- client analytics
- change and issue management
- product lifecycle and methodology
Project Management:
- project portfolio & collaboration
- agile & scrum planning board
- risk management
- change & issue management
- activities, milestones, tasks (including Gantt support)
- support for PMP methodology
- project members page
There is no trial version because you can get the “starter edition for micro businesses” for free. Other plans have monthly fees per product manager (from US $75 per month) and per contributor (from US $10 per month).
Interstate
Interstate is a solution for managing roadmaps, team communication, and team management. The product costs US $9 per user per month, however a free trial is available and you can also sign up for a free non-expiring plan that is limited to one project and two contributors.
ProdPad
Prodpad is a product management software helping a team to capture ideas and feedback, flesh them out into product specs, and build and share a roadmap. Key feature groups include:
- capturing ideas with a complete idea management module
- building a roadmap
- integrations with popular solutions including Jira, Pivotal Tracker, GitHub, Trello and other
- user-centric product management
- backlog management
- collaboration on mockups
A free 14 day trial is available. Prices start from US $59 per month for three product managers and three products. Apparently there is also a Startup plan for one product manager and one product – price on application.
Product Plan
Product Plan is “web-based software purpose-built for roadmaps. Our innovative features help you build, plan, show, and share an interactive roadmap that will impress.” These features include:
- building a roadmap
- maintaining a roadmap
- sharing the roadmap
- integration with Jira
A free 30 day trial is available. Prices start from US $17 per user per month for a team of 10+ users.
Roadmunk
Roadmunk is “Visual roadmap software for product management”. Features include:
- drag and drop roadmap editor
- Jira integration
- collaboration using a reviewer mode
- milestone management
- sharing and exporting
- multiple views for diverse audiences from the same dataset
- roadmap access and permissions
A 14 day free trial is available. Prices start from $19 per user per month (it’s a Canadian company so presumably it’s Canadian dollars).
VersionOne
Be prepared for a long quote 🙂 VersionOne is “an all-in-one enterprise agile solution for software organizations scaling agile. From discovery to delivery, VersionOne uniquely scales to any number of organizational levels and supports methodologies such as the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®), Enterprise Scrum, Kanban, DAD, LeSS, or a Hybrid approach.”
Key feature groups include:
- agile portfolio management
- program management
- agile project management
- quality management
- business intelligence
- enterprise-wide collaboration
- integration hub
- devops
Roadmapping (which is the topic of this article) is a part of the program management feature group. It allows you to capture and visually communicate roadmaps using a variety of styles and collaborate with key stakeholders.
A free trial is available. There is also a free edition but it does not include roadmapping tools. To get roadmapping tools you need to sign up to the Ultimate Edition (US $39 per user per month). Considering what this edition includes, the price looks very reasonable.