Gantt Chart to Roadmap — it’s possible.

So, a little ways back, I admonished everyone who fancied a Gantt chart as a roadmap and promised a follow-up to help you get there. This is a case where I opened my big mouth before I considered the lift. Building a roadmap is a non-trivial task, and telling you how to convert things without actually knowing what they look like feels a bit insane. But I’m always up for a challenge so let’s see if we can make this easy.

First, let’s all agree that the fundamental purpose of a roadmap is to communicate your product strategy and create alignment across stakeholders while visually representing the plan for what to build and when. This differs wildly from a Gantt chart whose purpose to show task level detailing with finite start/end dates and dependencies.

Let’s also acknowledge a baseline set of artifacts or understandings that should be in place before you can build out your roadmap. These are your business goals, product strategy/vision, and a current understanding of your desired business outcomes (and customer problem if we really want to get picky).

I’m going to make a wild assumption that if you have a Gantt chart, you probably have a business case or project charter document somewhere. You can use those documents to find the information needed to satisfy the pre-requisites. We can cover what to do if you don’t have them later; for now, we’ll assume you have them or can get them.

Now, how do we turn your Gantt chart into a roadmap? Most Gantt charts are output-focused and timeline-driven. So what you’ll find are row after row of features or tasks to be burned down or checked off. See my example here:

To make this a roadmap, you need to shift your focus from outputs to outcomes. Outcomes focus you on the “what” and “why” of the effort. Why are we building this? What problem are we trying to solve for our users? What business value are we trying to create? The outcome gives your team a clear picture of what mountain they’re attempting to climb. It also helps prevent falling into “feature factory” territory where you’re just cranking out features with no direction or pride of ownership.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Each one of those outcomes is an effort that spans more than one or two sprints. They often span months or quarters, and many of them run concurrently or in an overlapping sequence. They can also all be tied back to a business goal or vision.

So, if we flip our features and focus on outcomes, we can end up with something like this:

You see themes/outcomes in swimlanes down the side and features/initiatives spanning the timeline. You don’t need task-level detail or even story-level detail in this visualization. Remember our agreement at the start of this article: a roadmap’s fundamental purpose is to communicate your product strategy and create alignment across stakeholders while visually representing the plan for what to build and when. This version can do precisely that.

It’s also important to note that roadmaps and Gantt charts aren’t mutually exclusive. There are many efforts outside of just building the software that will need to be aligned and managed — support, marketing, security, legal, pricing etc. Gantt charts are excellent at tracking and coordinating these moving parts and can have an entry/milestone for each of your releases.

So there, as simple as I could make it without seeing your particular flavor of trainwreck. It’s possible to convert your beloved Gantt chart into an actual roadmap!