How to Show Customers What You Are Building in Product Roadmap

Transcript

In this tutorial you will set up a public roadmap in Product Roadmap, from the Setup Wizard to a page your customers can read. You need the free Product Roadmap plugin, installed and active. It takes about five minutes. There are six steps. Run the Setup Wizard. Add New Item. Put the roadmap on a page. See your roadmap as a customer. Choose what the board shows. Then install and activate Product Roadmap. Customers keep asking what is coming next, and you answer one email at a time. With Product Roadmap they read one public page instead: what is planned, in progress and shipped. A customer who sees the plan trusts you with their next purchase. Here is how to build it.

Step one. Run the Setup Wizard. Open Roadmap, then Setup Wizard. On Product Info, Product Name is what customers see. Item Labels name your items Feature, Task or Story. Then click Save and Continue. Settings is next. Enable Voting, Guest Voting and Enable Comments decide what customers can do. Import Demo Content adds sample items. Click Skip to add your own. Finish ends with Setup Complete, and a button, View Your Roadmap.

Step two. Add New Item. The Dashboard shows Total Items, Products and In Progress. The Roadmap menu holds All Items, Statuses, Categories and Settings. Changelog has its own menu. Under Quick Actions, click Add New Item. A blank item opens. The title is what customers read, and the text below says more. On the right, open Roadmap Details to set Priority, Progress and a Target Date. Under Statuses, pick one, for example Planned. Then click Publish.

Step three. Put the roadmap on a page. This ordinary page is named Lumen Roadmap. It holds one shortcode, roadmap, in square brackets, with the product to show. Add it to any page, click Update, and the roadmap is live.

Step four. See your roadmap as a customer. Items are grouped by due date, and each shows its votes and comments. The filters narrow the board. The Search roadmap box finds an item by name. Suggest Feature lets a customer tell you what they want. Click an item and it opens on its own page, with its votes and comments.

Step five. Choose what the board shows. Status equals planned shows only the Planned items. Category equals editor shows one category, so a page can answer one question. Options combine, so one page answers one question for your customers. Try each on a spare page first.

Step six. Install and activate Product Roadmap. Open Plugins, click Add New Plugin and upload the plugin file. Activate turns it on. This one is active, so the link reads Deactivate.

That is all six. The wizard run, an item added, the roadmap put on a page, seen as a customer, the board narrowed with options, and the plugin installed and active. Your customers can now read what you are building. Next in this series: Let customers vote and suggest ideas.