How to craft an ideal Public Roadmap

The number of Makers who create marvellous products on Directual is growing, so is the flow of feature requests. Users used to come up with ideas and bug reports on our live-chat, facebook group or Telegram-chats. The Directual team realised that the process needed to be streamlined. We craved to make it transparent in order to build trust with the market and with our users. The best solution for that was to build a public product development roadmap. There were some ready-to-use products like Trello, Jira or fancy Notion but they did’t meet our requirements. The only way to create the proper roadmap was to build it on Directual platform. In the current post we are revealing the details about our project and are telling how to build an ideal roadmap for yourself!

Why Trello sucks

We described the list of our needs as follows:

• A simple and clean roadmap with a few statuses;
• User’s authorisation;
• The ability of authorised users to add tasks, to upvote them (one time!), to get updates via email;
• Admin notifications (better—to notify via a Telegram-bot);
• Functions for admin to move the tasks according to the workflow;
• Ability to match user’s emails with their accounts on the platform;
• Integration with our CI/CD systems for release management;
• Flexibility for further changes and improvements—we are going to collect ideas referring to the Roadmap app as well!
  

We have tested almost all of the popular solutions: Trello, Jira, Asana, Notion, etc. And none of them covered all our needs. That turned out to strengthen our belief in no-code approach. Applying Directual we managed to craft 100% suitable app less than in a day!

Directual Public Roadmap

Here it is: Public Directual Roadmap

Any visitor sees three groups of tasks: planned, under development, released. Features are marked with green stripes, bugs—with red ones. Number in the corner of a task card is the number of upvotes. Cards with tasks under development contain the development progress bar. Released tasks are grouped to releases, details of which are on the second public page — Release notes.

If the visitor wants to upvote or to watch the features, he has to sign in or to sign up. Authorised user has an access to the additional pages, where he can:

• Upvote the features, including user-generated ideas in the backlog;
• Request a feature or report a bug;
• Subscribe for the feature updates.

The latter requires email address confirmation. The features, added by the user are watched by the author by default. If the request is declined, its author will receive the update, including the reason of decline (the most frequent one is the request double).

Have a look—you are welcome to participate!

Tutorial and template

As we’ve mentioned above, anyone can do the same — can create the roadmap app, which matches the business needs for 100%. Directual platform is an ideal choice for such internal apps!

The tutorial is a live-workshop. It consists of a few steps. The total time of the workshop is about 2 hours. Remember, that you can develop different features, having the tutorial just as an example.

The tutorial covers the essential topics of developing on Directual:

• Configuring the data base;
• Building API-endpoints;
• Adding objects via the Form;
• Setting up Cards and Table view for the data;
• Setting up role-based access model;
• Organising Email notifications;
• Managing object statuses using Actions;
• Applying different styling for your app;
• and many more…
  

Moreover, you’ll find a new free template on the app management page in the platform.

Thank you for reading! Feel free to reach the Directual team — we are always happy to chat with the Makers!