Really Simple Product Roadmaps: Can't find anything good so building something.

Hey Mick,

Checked it out and so far it's super smooth.

UI is very slick, UX for creating a team is great.

I'd like to see some form of a markup editor some styled notes. Is this planned?

Are you building this on a no-code platform? If yes what's it called.

Looking good so far, the notes text in the bottom right is pretty slick.

I'd be a fan of top to bottom

To be fair, Jira was decent about 7-8 years ago. Probably had 10-20% of the "features" it has now, but it was snappy. Right now, loading any bug (issue) takes like 20 seconds or more. Even when you try to download an attachment, it tries to "help you" and auto view it for you - which is beyond stupid. It even goes into zip files, making the load process even harder. And I'm just getting warmed up :D

I have no idea who comes up with their development ideas, but they should kick them out, with a kick on their behind, just to make sure he'll find their way out faster.

I signed up and played with it a bit! Love how mobile friendly it is. It’s simple with just enough to check the boxes. Some things I’d need before using it for my team (for reference I’m a PM for a ~14 person team of software engineers and data scientists at a large enterprise):

• At our team size we usually run 1-3 objectives in parallel. A fully linear roadmap doesn’t well articulate where we parallelize. Ill acknowledge that this likely not necessary for smaller teams.
• I usually host our roadmaps for casual reference by our stakeholders which you’ve got here, but honestly most never check it and it’s our regular sync up meetings where I show them a PowerPoint slide with the roadmap where they actually see it. Some sort of image export would be helpful (unless I missed that?)
• My personal take is to make the roadmap alittle more visually appealing, a lot of times when I’m sharing a roadmap it feels like I’m selling something. I put a lot of attention to the visual appearance of what I share. This also could just be me so take that with a grain of salt.

All and all, love what you have in such a little amount of time!

Hah! Your point about timelines never being accurate is the primary reason I abandoned this sort of roadmap for my team, so I hear you there! Excited to see what you release, I’ll check out the video

If you just want feedback I think you should not require email addresses. I think most people will only register and give their email address if they feel it's worth it.

Hey @primer,

Looking really good. 🔥

I tested on Firefox on Fedora 33. Here's what I noticed:

• During signup and login, Firefox complains about an unencrypted connection and the page potentially being insecure.
• I didn't have to confirm my email address and I received no email from the product upon signup. That's confusing as I usually have to do it everywhere.
• For my name (Niklas), it says "Niklas's Team" in the upper right corner. It should be "Niklas' Team".
• There's no empty state for the "Home" page yet. Guess it's coming. :)
• When trying to add a second team member, I saw a Symfony stack trace.
  • Exception: Expected response code 250 but got code "550", with message "550 5.7.1 Relaying denied"
  • Error in: /app/app/Actions/Jetstream/InviteTeamMember.php (line 38)
  • Two things:
    1. The exception itself is obviously not perfect. :)
    2. I wouldn't show stack traces to my users.
  • Probably due to the error, I haven't received the invitation emails.
• Maybe you could skip the "New roadmap" screen where you enter name and description, and jump straight into the roadmap editing screen with the cursor in the name field. Maybe prefill it with some data if you need something in your DB.
• It will be more comfortable if the "Roadmap Settings" section auto-saves without having to press the "save settings" button.
• It would be helpful to have a clarification what exactly will happen when hitting the big plus on the "Preview & Edit" screen. I was 80% sure that I know what it means, but it wasn't 100% clear.
  • This could potentially be circumvented by initializing the roadmap with 1-3 dummy elements to show the user what the page is about.
• When adding new roadmap elements, it would be cool to have them just appear on the page without having to complete a popup and then being able to edit them inline.
• I was confused that the description of my new roadmap item wasn't shown after adding it. I tried editing the title by clicking on it and then the element expanded. That was unexpected.
• Nothing seems to happen when clicking on the checkmark next to my roadmap item. The card expands or collapses but that's it.
• The "Edit Roadmap Element" action would be smoother to do if I could just edit the element's details inline.
• Editing, adding or deleting a roadmap element leads to a page reload. That feels bad as a user and I could potentially lose unsaved changes in the left column.
• While creating my roadmap, I wondered: How is it going to be displayed to the non-editor end-user? Why would I need formatting options for the roadmap element description? Why is the line count important? And, again: How is it going to look for the end-user?
• The spell check was unexpected and nice, but it's going to be confusing for non-English-speaking users.
• Drag-n-drop to reorder roadmap elements doesn't work. The page says that it's possible, but it doesn't work for me.
• What does the "Notes" label in the bottom right corner of a roadmap element mean? Clicking it only expands/collapses the card.
• "Copy link" is a bit confusing: Which link do I copy? Is it the link to editing the roadmap? Or is it a non-editable page where external people can view it?
  • I wasn't even sure if there even was a non-editable version.
    • If there was, I wasn't entirely sure how to get there. Having an actual "preview" button on the "preview & edit" page would be awesome.
• Having the "copy link" feature decoupled visually from visibility and status is confusing. I'd place them next to each other.
• Visibility and status took me a while to discover. I discarded the toggles as unimportant settings and didn't even read the labels. Then I created my roadmap and wondered: "Now what? What do I do? How do I show this to my colleagues and/or my users?"
  • Having publish/unpublish as a button instead of a toggle would help in my opinion.
  • Maybe a share/publish action would make sense below the actual roadmap, i.e. before the plus button. That's where I was looking for a hint on how to continue.
• The expandable roadmap elements are really missing the cursor: pointer; CSS property. Both in edit and in view-only mode.
• On the non-editable roadmap it's hard to discover that there are descriptions to the elements. Maybe it would make sense to show the first two lines of the description and hide the rest. That would also make the roadmap look more professional.
• Having a proper heading for the non-editable page would help in my opinion. Something like "${PRODUCT_NAME}'s roadmap" would be great, and it should be centered instead of being right-aligned in the header.
• On the Create Roadmap page
  • It wasn't clear to me what the "Control Center" button would do. Why is it even necessary when I can just click "back" in the browser? If you want to keep it, I would consider calling it "Home" or "Cancel" or "Go back".
  • The description field did not take up the full width. It was only 247px wide.
• The page title often just said "Laravel". I guess you already have that on your todo list, though.

Overall, I'm really impressed by what you built in such a short time. That's awesome, man! 👍

Would you mind sharing your tech stack? Did you use any templates for UI or some kind of code generator for the login system?

Also: How did you get 2FA and the session management UI implemented so fast? It's not a common thing to see in an alpha, but definitely appreciated. Did you use an authentication provider? Did you reuse old code?