How to set up effective product roadmap tracking in Jira

Other Questions Jira
1

Our team is trying to figure out the best way to track our product roadmap using Jira (version 4.4.3) and Greenhopper. Right now we have a setup that works for sprint management but doesn’t give us the roadmap view we need.

Currently we use Versions to organize our weekly sprints like “Sprint 16”, “Sprint 17” and so on. Each version contains all the tickets and user stories for that particular sprint cycle.

For organizing work we use Components to group related functionality together. Things like “Payment Gateway Integration”, “Email Service Migration”, “Bug Fixes” and “Code Refactoring” help us categorize our work.

The problem is that Jira’s built-in roadmap only displays our sprint versions and their completion status. Since we already use versions for sprint tracking, this doesn’t help us see our bigger picture initiatives. Many of our major features take multiple sprints to complete.

What we really want is to track and visualize our major product initiatives rather than just seeing a list of weekly sprint cycles. Features like “Automated Testing Setup”, “Platform Modernization” and “Infrastructure Upgrades” span across many sprints.

What’s the recommended approach for creating this kind of high-level roadmap view in Jira while keeping our current sprint structure intact?

2

We faced a similar challenge last year when managing cross-sprint initiatives. What worked for us was creating a separate project specifically for roadmap epics while keeping your existing sprint project unchanged.

In the roadmap project, each epic represents one of your major initiatives like “Platform Modernization”. Then you link individual stories from your sprint project to these roadmap epics using Jira’s epic linking functionality. This way your sprint management stays exactly as it is now, but you get the high-level view you’re looking for.

The key insight is using two different projects rather than trying to force everything into one structure. Your sprint project continues using versions for “Sprint 16”, “Sprint 17” etc, while the roadmap project uses versions for actual product releases like “Q2 Release” or “v2.1”.

Greenhopper can then generate roadmap reports from the epic project that show progress across your major initiatives. It takes about a day to set up properly but gives you exactly what you described wanting.