Project management is an exacting profession — one missed detail can spell disaster for you, your team, and the organization. In your role, having the right tools to help you check all the boxes is an essential ingredient for success. One such tool is the project management template.
Integrating a variety of project management planning templates into your practice will help keep all relevant information organized and within reach for easy reference. These tools also work as a checklist, providing reassurance you’ve addressed each requirement — especially when tracking a complex initiative or executing multiple projects concurrently. Learn more about the various types of templates and how to optimize these tools for the highest project success.
What’s a project management roadmap template?
A project management roadmap template provides stakeholders with a high-level, easy-to-follow overview of everything needed for a successful outcome. It can cover work for the entire project or smaller tasks, such as steps to mitigate a specific risk or your communication plan.
You could choose to create a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel template and generate an administrative document for every single aspect of a project, but that’s a time-consuming and work-intensive effort. Even a simple project management template can help you and your team hit the ground running, saving time and directing energy toward delivering top-quality work instead of developing ways to administer it.
Incorporating templates into your operations offers a clear starting point to manage a complex problem, cutting out the guesswork of where to begin. Project management templates also provide consistency to your team, standardizing processes so they know what to expect and creating alignment. Once you’ve customized the format, you can reuse those templates — including the project timeline, milestones, and tasks — for future projects, saving even more time.
Top 7 project management roadmap templates
Every project management roadmap template offers unique features, but most of them deliver these standard benefits:
- Tracking: Monitor roadmap activity for easy progress visibility.
- Flexibility: Switch between swimlane and timeline views and export results using your choice of formats.
- Collaboration: Use features designed to facilitate documentation sharing and discussion.
- Resource allocation: Designate resources to specific teams or departments according to roadmap entries.
- Due dates: Keep everyone on task by adding milestones and deadlines to the roadmap.
- High-level schedule: Prevent timelines from becoming too granular by organizing initiatives into looser time buckets.
- Agile frameworks: Organize your roadmap by theme, team, or status.
- Data sets: Filter data and save the information for later without recreating a new roadmap each time.
If you’re ready to put away the spreadsheets and begin using roadmap templates as part of your project planning effort, here are some of the best options available to integrate with project management software like Jira.
1. Project roadmap
Track and illustrate your project plan’s components and milestones, including objectives, initiatives, and deliverables, with a project roadmap template. Similar to a Gantt chart, this roadmap type acts as a project management schedule template, building alignment around timelines and giving stakeholders a bird’s-eye view of key tasks, deadlines, and resource allocation. It also offers a snapshot of which tasks are in progress, complete, or waiting in the backlog.
Timeline view
Swimlane view
2. Innovation roadmap
Ensure your organization continues to evolve and remain competitive by embracing an innovation roadmap template, which helps you evaluate new opportunities, test ideas, and keep up with emerging technology. This strategic project plan template is among product managers and executives. It visually illustrates connectivity across teams and efforts, building alignment behind new business models, products, or value-adding improvements.
Timeline view
Swimlane view
3. Agile roadmap
Unlike standard roadmaps, which use a timeline template, an agile roadmap focuses on project themes and progress to visualize how a product, software, or technology will evolve. It’s a flexible project management tool, allowing project managers to adapt and adjust sprint planning and respond quickly to change. This template emphasizes what you’re building and its progress without stressing the project timeline.
Theme view
Fuzzy time view
Sprint view
4. Business development roadmap
Sales, marketing, and product teams use business development roadmaps for prioritizing product development and other projects to maximize revenue and market-share growth, often during a single fiscal year. Other departments reference the template to understand organizational strategy and tactics, review everyone’s contributions, and prepare teams to meet quarterly business milestones.
Timeline view
Swimlane view
5. Website roadmap
Whether your website is your ultimate product or a part of your organization’s marketing strategy, a website project management template can establish alignment behind tasks and timelines for content creation, design, and development. This roadmap showcases task dependencies, allowing maximum efficiency when assigning responsibilities. Using this tool, you can stay on top of deadlines with up-to-the-minute status updates, allowing the team to monitor progress and address roadblocks before they impact the timeline.
A website roadmap template may include an Agile framework, which lets you organize your roadmap by theme, team, or status.
Timeline view
Swimlane view
6. Strategic roadmap
Communicate your business’s long-term vision and the strategies to achieve it using an easy-to-read strategic roadmap template. This option acts as a checklist template, tracking mission-critical initiatives or objectives over an extended timeline.
Strategic templates offer features for consolidating roadmaps for the entire department or team into a single portfolio using a few clicks.
Timeline view
Swimlane view
7. Startup roadmap
Bring your vision to life while keeping your eye on the prize by plotting organizational evolution using a startup roadmap template. This roadmap brings clarity by offering a high-level view of the development process, charting how an emerging business will launch and scale. Use this overview as a guide, helping your team maintain focus on core activities and long-term outcomes as the business grows.
Timeline view
Swimlane view
Successful project management with Roadmunk by Tempo
As a project manager, you have a multitude of tasks to juggle — like writing the project charter, negotiating the project scope, and establishing a work plan everyone can live with. It’s not easy, but leveraging roadmapping templates like those from Roadmunk by Tempo helps with the heavy lifting. You’ll be amazed by how streamlined project management and tracking become with Tempo.
