How I automate roadmap updates and reporting to save hours each week

No more chasing drivers and gathering data from multiple tools.

Jane Chiu

Technical Program Manager at Coda

How I automate roadmap updates and reporting to save hours each week

By Jane Chiu

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There are two types of people in the world: the planners, and those who prefer to improvise as they go. While I’m a fan of “going with the flow” for a vacation, say, having no plan at all doesn’t cut it when it comes to building products. That’s why every successful product team knows a clear product roadmap is non-negotiable—not having one is a fast track to misaligned teams who are unclear on what they’re building, when, and why.
Your product roadmap is the plan of all plans. It details what you’re going to build and provides strategic direction on how your product will evolve over time. Typically, it includes the specific updates you plan to ship, and when—be it for the next quarter, six months, or year. It’s a living document that evolves over time. I’ve found it to be an indispensable tool for getting alignment—with a clear roadmap, everyone from the engineers breathing life into the features to the sales team promoting them knows what’s coming down the line.
In my experience, those responsible for managing the roadmap—typically product managers, technical program managers, scrum masters, or product ops teams—often have to run a time-intensive, cobbled-together process to keep things up to date. This usually involves gathering data from multiple docs, sheets, and tools like Jira or GitHub. Unsurprisingly, this process often requires manual intervention and eventually breaks down, leading to out-of-date information, misalignment, and wasted time. Having experienced this pain myself, moving to roadmapping in Coda has been a revelation. Coda’s building blocks, automations, and integrations make it easy to create a roadmap that’s always up to date with all the information everyone needs but without all the repetitive, manual work. Here’s how I save several hours a week managing our roadmap with Coda.

1. Getting everyone aligned, without the endless meetings.

 Before we talk about keeping the roadmap up to date, let’s talk about actually creating it in the first place. Coda makes this really easy in three ways:
  1. One hub for all our planning: Because Coda lets you combine text, data, workflows, and third-party content into your docs, you can use Coda as one centralized hub for all your product planning. We have our strategy writeups, OKRs, meeting notes, designs, and any other context we need all together, making it much easier to build the roadmap (in the same doc of course!) without having to switch between multiple tabs and tools or constantly send out links to new docs.
  2. Interactive docs: Rather than multiple meandering meetings, endless docs and presentations, and long comment threads, we get alignment quickly using “decision docs.” These use interactive elements like ideas tables, voting and reaction buttons, and “living” writeups. Now, I can share a writeup or proposal and get a quick sense of who’s read it, what the general sentiment is, and whether it needs deeper discussion—simply by adding a few buttons to my doc.
  3. Customizable views: Coda enables us to visualize our roadmap in multiple ways, so we can create different views to suit different needs without the data getting out of sync. For example, we use table views for task tracking, timeline views for capacity planning, and calendar views for our launch teams. We also integrate content from other tools like Jira and Figma using Packs, so we don’t need to worry about copy-pasting information between tools. You can integrate content from many other tools too, including Asana, Trello, Jira, Pivotal Tracker, and more.

2. Timely updates, without the chasing.

 Once your roadmap is set up, it’s essential it stays up-to-date and relevant so everyone knows they can trust the information. Without Coda, I’ve seen teams take the roadmap and break it down into tasks or goals within whatever separate tools they’re using. This means there’s no longer a centralized source of truth, and goals can get misrepresented as they’re copy-pasted. Plus, gathering updates from multiple teams and tools is a laborious and tedious task, meaning it happens less frequently than is ideal.
With Coda, everything is all together and connected. Teams can create their own views of the roadmap filtered to just their tasks, so they can track their progress and manage their day-to-day work from the same place. This makes it much easier to keep the roadmap updated without having to remember to log in to another tool. For times when we do need to give teams a little nudge to update their tasks, Coda’s automations make this super simple. Before, I had to manually go through the roadmap to see what needed updating and then send out individual reminders or dig around for the latest information in other tools. With Coda, I now have automated emails and Slack messages that trigger when an item hasn’t been updated in the past week. These reminders are only sent to those who haven’t already updated (so I’m not spamming everyone) and are personalized rather than a generic “Hi all, make sure to do your updates!” This reduces notification blindness and ensures updates are done on time, all without me having to do any chasing. Plus, I can get Coda AI to help make my messages more engaging too.

3. Sharing progress, without the manual reports.

 In the past, I’ve had the not-so-fun job of gathering data from an array of different docs and tools to create reports on our roadmap progress. This involved hours of manual work that ultimately resulted in a presentation that was out of date the minute it was shared, and countless redos when new data came in at the last minute. With Coda, rather than having to compile these moment-in-time presentations, we have always-live and automatically updated dashboards that anyone can view whenever they like. We have different dashboards for different audiences. For example, I have a dashboard for each team with just their tasks and a dashboard that gives a high-level overview of progress for leaders.
I like to use a variety of different visualizations to make the dashboards engaging, like progress bars, charts, and timeline views. Conditional formatting also helps highlight whether things are on or off track at a glance. And because everything in Coda is connected, I never have to worry about the data going stale or getting out of sync. Now, I don’t have to spend hours compiling updates and time-consuming reports—I can simply point people to the dashboards to get what they need.

Coda shaves hours off your roadmap process.

 Using Coda to manage our product roadmap saves me hours of repetitive work—time I can now spend doing other, more useful tasks. If you’re struggling with out-of-date roadmaps, scattered information, and having to chase down updates, Coda can probably help you too. If you’d like to learn more, I recently hosted an interactive session about building systems in Coda and Jira to automate your product development and reporting. My colleague Tanvir Kaur and I focused on how Coda enhances Jira’s workflows to make it easier for everyone to stay on the same page. Watch the session on-demand here. You can also take a look at our Ultimate Handbook for Product Teams, which has plenty of practical advice and templates for using Coda across your product development cycle.
Read the handbook

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