Time Suck to Time

Save: Spreadsheets
vs. Roadmaps
Table of Contents
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Why Do Product Managers Need Roadmaps at All? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

7 Reasons to Get Your Roadmaps Out Spreadsheets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

10 Magical Things That Happen When You Switch to a True Roadmap App . . . . . . . . 16

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

TIME SUCK TO TIME SAVE: SPREADSHEETS VS. ROADMAPS 2

Introduction
Roadmapping is difficult. No matter how skilled you are at the process,
creating and sharing a product roadmap will always present strategic
challenges, including:

• Competing Priorities
You can’t implement every good idea

• Pressure from Stakeholders

You can’t make everyone happy

• Limitations on Your Team’s Resources and Budget

You can’t afford everything

TIME SUCK TO TIME SAVE: SPREADSHEETS VS. ROADMAPS 3

Using the Wrong Tool Makes Roadmapping More Difficult
Considering how challenging roadmapping will be, you don’t want to make
it harder by using a tool that’s ineffective at capturing and presenting your
product strategy. Unfortunately, product managers make this mistake every
day when they use spreadsheet software for roadmapping.
Bottom Line: Nothing Beats a True Roadmap App
But this is a how-to guide, not a suspense novel. So, here’s the
bottom line. When you’re building a roadmap, you want to use
an app created specifically for that purpose—not one designed
for bookkeeping, financial analysis, and graphing data.

Our 2020 Product Manager Report, which included responses from more
than 2,500 product professionals, found that nearly 1 in 4 (23%) still use
spreadsheets for their roadmaps.

The ebook will lay out a case for why you do not—repeat, do not—want to
build and maintain a roadmap in spreadsheet format. And then we will walk
you through a better alternative.

TIME SUCK TO TIME SAVE: SPREADSHEETS VS. ROADMAPS 4

Switch to Native Roadmapping Software Right Now
The good news: You can start using an intuitive roadmap app immediately.
And you can try it for free. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to build a
roadmap in less time than it took you to read the introduction. To quote our
customer Belron, which employs 25,000 people worldwide:
“From the very beginning, everything about ProductPlan felt so intuitive.
I was able to build and share my first roadmap with my team in less than
20 minutes.”
Sound good? Keep reading. We’ll discuss a few great reasons to retire your
spreadsheet software from the roadmapping business—and leave it with
your accounting team, where it belongs.
First, though, let’s quickly review the basics: Why do you need a roadmap in
the first place? To refresh your memory about this fundamental question will
help clarify how using a spreadsheet can lead to all sorts of issues.
TIME SUCK TO TIME SAVE: SPREADSHEETS VS. ROADMAPS 5

Why Do Product Managers
Need Roadmaps at All?
A product roadmap should represent a strategic blueprint for
your product. It should convey big-picture plans and goals.
Your roadmap has several important jobs to do, including:
Capture and Convey Your Strategic Thinking
When you present your roadmap to the development team,
your sales staff, senior management, or other stakeholders, they
should see a list of projects and the strategic thread that ties those
projects together. Your roadmap should tell the story of your
product’s future success.
Build Team Alignment Around Objectives & Plans
When you build and share it correctly, your roadmap should
present a clear picture to all stakeholders about what you plan to
do, in what order, and what you expect those plans to accomplish.
In other words, a key role of your roadmap is to ensure everyone
working on the product is on the same page about what they’re
doing and why.
Generate Enthusiasm for the Product
The best product roadmaps do more than display upcoming
projects. They do more than convey the story behind these
projects as well. Roadmaps tell the product story persuasively and
excitingly. They inspire the teams reviewing them. They motivate
these teams to put their best efforts into achieving the market
success that the product team believes is possible.
TIME SUCK TO TIME SAVE: SPREADSHEETS VS. ROADMAPS 6
 Accomplishing these objectives will be more
difficult with this roadmap view:

With all these important jobs to do—quickly communicate strategy,

align teams, and build enthusiasm—your roadmap must be visually
compelling. It should also be easy to update from anywhere and
allow you to change views and bring up related data on the fly—so
when you’re sharing it, you can keep the presentation momentum A better alternative looks like this:
strong by showing the right level of detail at the right time.

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 01
Spreadsheet Roadmaps Aren’t Engaging
Spreadsheets are flat documents, showing column after column
and row after row. You can add all the colorful cell backgrounds you
want, but the app can’t capture that clean, visually powerful look
you want to display when you’re sharing your product strategy.

7 Reasons to Get Spreadsheet apps also make it difficult to jump, in real-time, to

Your Roadmaps Out
of Spreadsheets
Now, let’s review some of the many reasons spreadsheets
just won’t let you build a world-class product roadmap.
different roadmap views or to data you’ve compiled but hidden to
keep the presentation clean. (Unless you build and plan to regularly
update multiple versions of the same roadmap. As we’ll discuss
below, this creates its own problems.)
If you’re presenting to your executives, your spreadsheet app
might force you to show far more detail than these stakeholders
want to see. That could sap some of their enthusiasm during your
presentation and cause them to get distracted by minor initiatives.

Worse, your high-level strategy—the product’s compelling story—

could get lost in a sea of rows and columns.

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02
Spreadsheets Make It More Difficult To Align Teams
When you share your product roadmap with your cross-functional team,
one of your goals is to make sure all these stakeholders have a shared
understanding of the big-picture strategy. That will help ensure each team
is working toward a common objective.
The best roadmaps convey a visual story.
But spreadsheets merely display data.
But when they check in periodically to review the roadmap, how will
these teams make sense of the rows and columns without you there telling
them what all the data mean? How will they know why you’ve chosen to
prioritize the things you have? A spreadsheet will fall short of helping you
tell this story.
Even when you present the roadmap live to stakeholders, you’ll still have
trouble communicating the high-level strategy. For example, spreadsheets
really can’t let you switch your roadmap display. The static nature of a
spreadsheet makes it challenging to highlight specific details or change
roadmap views as questions arise.
Yes, you can create multiple spreadsheet files or tabs in the same file,
each with a different perspective. You can build one version with a lot
of tactical detail for the development team and another displaying only
strategic-level items to show your execs. But that’s going to take a lot of
work, and it still won’t let you easily pop open the strategic reasoning or
data behind each item.
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03
Spreadsheet Roadmaps Make It Tough To Show Your Evidence
Let’s say you’re reviewing the product roadmap with your sales managers
or senior leadership team. Someone in the room points to an item on
the roadmap and asks for data supporting your decision. What will that
functionality do for our user base, and how will it help our bottom line?
If you’re presenting the roadmap as a spreadsheet, you can’t simply click
into the cell your stakeholder is asking about and bring up your evidence.
You’ll need to go looking for it in another file or another app altogether.
That could break the momentum of the meeting and cost you some
enthusiasm points.
Your presentation won’t be as clean or compelling if you need to keep
switching tabs or referring to your notes every time someone asks for more
detail about something they see on screen.
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04
Keeping a Spreadsheet Roadmap Up-to-Date Is Time-Consuming
If you’ve ever used PowerP… ahem, any popular presentation software,
you know what a time-sink creating a deck can be. All that manual textbox
building, lining up boxes correctly, cropping shapes, recoloring images, and
on and on.
Maintaining your roadmap in spreadsheet format can be a time-consuming,
hair-tearing experience in a similar way. Here are just a couple of examples
of how you can easily waste massive amounts of time:
Otherwise, you could find that these descriptions don’t fully display, which
will leave your audience confused. Or you’ll need to wrap the text, which
could push other important details too far down the screen.
Either way, you’re going to spend a lot of time manually dragging, merging,
splitting, wrapping, and otherwise manipulating your roadmap text to
prevent problems like this:

Every Update Can Be a Cell-Manipulating Pain

Say you want to include several epics across the top of your roadmap. In
a spreadsheet, you’ll need to write each one using a similar number of
characters. And if you also want to include a lengthier description of each
epic under its title cell, you’ll need to make those narratives roughly the
same length as well.

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You Might Need To Build Several Versions of the
Same Roadmap
A product roadmap typically has multiple audiences. The development
team needs to see it to know what they’ll be building and why. Marketing
needs to see it to gain an understanding of how to craft the product’s
messaging, articulate its value propositions, and schedule ad campaigns
Penn Foster
ProductPlan customer Penn Foster faced this exact challenge, and it
played a big role in leading them to our roadmap app. As Vice President
Paula Robert-Hunt explains:
“To manage these roadmaps, I was doing the work twice. I’d use Excel to

to coincide with the launch. build plans, schedule timelines, sort, categorize… then recreate the data
in Visio to present it to our executives. It worked the other way, too: Any
And the executive staff needs to review the roadmap to determine whether changes I made to the Visio-based view, I’d also have to update in Excel.”
to give the product team the green light.
Sounds awful, right? Penn Foster sure thought so.
These audiences will want to focus on different details of the roadmap.
They will all benefit from their own unique view. But a spreadsheet won’t
allow you to instantly jump to the best view for each audience, which means
none of your stakeholder presentations will be as efficient and compelling
as they could be.

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05
Spreadsheets Make It Difficult to Sync Roadmap Data With Key Apps
If you’re maintaining your product roadmap in spreadsheet format, you’ll
need to manually update your team’s workflow apps each time something
changes on the roadmap.
The manual nature of spreadsheet software can
create additional manual tasks.
Let’s say your development team uses Jira or Asana to track their tasks. If
the team completes work on an epic or user story, someone will need to
remember to go into that task management app and make the update.
And if you change something on the roadmap—for example, pushing out
the timeframe on an epic—you’ll need to manually go into your company’s
collaboration app to let your stakeholders know. Maybe your dev team uses
Slack to communicate. You’ll need to send a note to their Slack channel. If
the marketing and sales teams use Microsoft Teams, you’ll need to draft and
send a separate message over Teams, alerting them to the update.
In other words, the manual nature of spreadsheet software can create
additional manual tasks in your company’s other workflow apps each time
something changes on the roadmap.
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06
Using a Spreadsheet Elevates the Risk of Version-Control Problems
Version-control problems could be the most significant because it can lead
to teams working on incorrect or outdated objectives. When your roadmap
is a spreadsheet, you’ll need to manually send it to all relevant stakeholders
every time you update it. That can lead to all sorts of problems.
FOR EXAMPLE
• You’ve been sending and receiving so many versions of your roadmap,
and there are now so many different file names in your folder, even you
aren’t sure which one is the most up-to-date.
• For whatever reason, your development manager missed your latest
email with the updated roadmap attached. Now she’s working with

• You send it to a few colleagues in development, to get their opinion. the previous version—and her team will soon start work on an initiative

One of them later forgets this wasn’t a “ready for primetime” version that’s missing a key piece of new information.

and mistakenly sends it onto their team as the current roadmap.

• Your product marketing team reviews their emails for the most recent
roadmap. They’re not sure if the file called XZYproduct-roadmap-v3-
final-final-revised or XZYproduct-roadmap-v3-UPDATED is the
correct one. So, they guess.

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07
Spreadsheets Can Be Dull
Yes, we went over this one already. But it bears repeating. Remember,
a roadmap should capture your stakeholders’ imagination, provoke some
enthusiasm about your product, and make sure everyone understands
their role in helping the product become a market success.

Try doing all that in your roadmap meeting while saying to your audience,
“If you’ll look at cell F7…”

A roadmap should capture your stakeholders'

imagination and provoke some enthusiasm
about your product.
 Okay, we’ve persuaded you to stop trying to capture and share your
product strategy in accounting software. Now let’s look at the best
practice for roadmap creation: a purpose-built roadmapping app.

Let’s review 10 genuinely amazing things that will happen to your

process when you switch to one of these apps:

01 You’ll create visually engaging roadmaps that generate enthusiasm

02 You can tell a persuasive story about your product vision

and strategy
10 Magical Things That
03 You’ll build alignment, trust, and chemistry with the whole team
Happen When You Switch
You can update your roadmap more easily than ever
to a True Roadmap App
04

05 You’ll create a single source of truth for your roadmap

06 You can show just the right level of detail to each audience

07 You’ll save enormous amounts of time

08 You’ll empower your development team to do their best work

09 You’ll help your distributed teams collaborate more effectively

10 You’ll build better products

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01
You’ll Create Visually Engaging Roadmaps
That Generate Enthusiasm
With a native roadmap application that lets you build beautiful roadmaps—
like this one to the right—you can easily communicate your product’s story to
relevant stakeholders. And present your strategy in a compelling visual way.

You can also build the enthusiasm among your team that you’ll need to
ensure everyone feels motivated to bring their A-game to making the
product a success.

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02
You Can Tell a Persuasive Story About Your
Product Vision and Strategy
Remember that hypothetical we discussed earlier, where someone points
to an initiative on your roadmap and asks why you’ve prioritized it?

Imagine how cool it would be if you could click on that item, bring up the
background detail, and show the stakeholder your strategic reasoning. If
you had a chart or graph supporting your case, you could bring it up with
that same click.

With the right roadmap software—like ProductPlan’s app—you can do just

that. As you see in the screenshot to the right, click into the bar or container
on your roadmap, and you can immediately bring up details to answer your
stakeholder’s question with confidence, enthusiasm, and evidence!

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03
You’ll Build Alignment, Trust, and Chemistry With the Whole Team
When you maintain and share your product roadmap as a feature list in a team truly wants to partner with you on this endeavor. Here's our plan, our
series of spreadsheet columns, you're sending a signal to your stakeholders: thinking behind it, and why we believe it will be successful.
Here's what we're doing, and that's all you need to know.
That level of transparency will, in turn, boost your cross-functional team's
You might not mean to send this signal, but it's unmistakable. When you trust in you and encourage them to give you their best.
examine your roadmap, the static spreadsheet view won't show your
developers or marketing team, or executives the why behind your decisions. ProductPlan customer Namely has found a creative way to use our

It won't help them understand your initiatives' strategic objectives, which roadmapping app specifically to accomplish this team-building goal. As you

could force them to guess. can see in the image above, Namely's product team keeps their roadmap
displayed on a large monitor in their office's main common area. The display
But when you show them a visually clear and compelling roadmap, you'll of the roadmap is a brilliant idea to boost cross-functional team chemistry!
be sending your cross-functional team a very different signal: The product

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04
You Can Update Your Roadmap More Easily
Than Ever
With a native, web-based roadmap app, you’ll only ever need to make
updates to your roadmap in one place. And because your stakeholders will
only need a link to the roadmap—and not the latest version of the static file—
you’ll never have to worry about version-control problems.

Also, the right app—like ProductPlan’s—will even let you make automatic
updates to the roadmap when you sync it with your workflow apps like Jira
and Azure DevOps. For example, when your developers progress on a task
and update the relevant Jira ticket, you can automatically bring that great
news into your roadmap. Then, the next time you bring up the “Percent
Complete” on that roadmap task, you’ll see how far along it is.

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05
You’ll Create a Single Source of Truth for
Your Roadmap
This is one of the biggest benefits of switching from spreadsheets to a native
roadmap tool. When you get your roadmaps out of static file format—and
into an online version that your stakeholders can access anywhere—you
can ensure you won’t have teams working on an outdated strategy or on
initiatives you’ve decided to replace with different ones.

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 ENGINEERING VIEW

06
You Can Show Just the Right Level of Detail
to Each Audience
Native roadmap apps show the right level of detail to your audience. When
it’s time to present your roadmap to your senior leadership team, show them
your big-picture product strategy. Focus on the high-level plans and the
successes you anticipate from each significant initiative on the roadmap.

Then, when the execs have given you the go-ahead to start development,
you can switch to a different view—say, the overall initiative timeline—to
show your engineering team. You can change views during that meeting as EXECUTIVE VIEW
well and walk your engineers through your strategic thinking. But they’re
going to be interested in the workload you’re planning for them, so they
can start estimating timeframes and tasks for their teams. So, let your
development meeting focus on those details.

Fortunately, because you now have purpose-built roadmap software,

you can accomplish all these objectives—and create just the correct
presentation for every stakeholder audience.

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07
You’ll Save Enormous Amounts of Time
It should be evident at this point, but switching to a native roadmapping
will save you time in many ways:

• You won’t need to create or update multiple versions of the exact

roadmap.

• You’ll be able to move items around on the roadmap with a simple

drag-and-drop (rather than cutting and pasting text, adding columns,
deleting rows, merging or splitting cells, etc.)

• You’ll be able to automatically update your teams about roadmap

updates through their preferred apps (Slack, Teams, etc.) rather than
having to manually draft and send these updates every time.

And you’ll discover a zillion more time-savers in your roadmapping process.

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Case Study: AMN Healthcare
ProductPlan customer AMN Healthcare, for example, used to spend
massive amounts of time—often in four-hour marathon sessions—bringing
together its various teams to present their roadmaps and get everyone
synced on strategy.
Courtney Freitag, a Senior Product Manager with AMN, explains:
“Everyone had their own idea, but they couldn’t be collapsed into a
comprehensive view. We needed to show execs why and how those
activities align.”
ProductPlan’s roadmap app makes it easy for AMN’s multiple teams
to combine their strategies and plans in a “Portfolio View’ roadmap.
That ability, Courtney points out, has led not only to more efficient and
persuasive presentations to the company’s executives but also to even
more time savings:
“It would probably take me five months to gather all the information
to figure out which features and functionality we’re building that would
impact a strategic goal. Now it takes me seconds.”
TIME SUCK TO TIME SAVE: SPREADSHEETS VS. ROADMAPS 24
08
You’ll Empower Your Development Team To Do Their Best Work
We asked Jay Hum, Product Director for the vehicle-data company
Autonomic, why his team switched from spreadsheets to ProductPlan’s
roadmap app.
Jay’s product management philosophy rests on this principle: “alignment
enables autonomy,” and his goal is to give his colleagues the information
they need to execute according to their expertise.

Jay explained that one of the key drivers was the ability to empower his With the ProductPlan roadmap app, Jay’s team can easily communicate to
company’s engineering team in a way they hadn’t been able to do using their engineering teams the three critical pieces of information they need to
spreadsheets to share their roadmap. do their best work:

Here’s how Jay sums up the benefit of using native roadmap software to 01 What are we building?
communicate these strategic details to his development team:
02 Why are we building this thing, and how do we believe it will benefit

“If they don’t have the proper context, they may go off and blindly build our users and business?

something because this is what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed

03 Who is our customer, and what do they need?
to go build. But if you give them the proper context and end goal, you’re
allowing the engineers a bit more freedom and a bit more creativity to
think about how they would actually approach the problem that they are
trying to solve without you being too prescriptive.”

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09
You’ll Help Your Distributed Teams Collaborate
More Effectively
We’re in a remote world now, and that trend will only continue to increase.
You’ll find yourself working with a product owner across the country,
marketing creatives and developers overseas, and so on. Without the right
roadmapping tool, it’s going to be difficult for these teams to collaborate
around your shared product strategy.

But with the right app, you can make your product roadmap a digital
collaboration hub for all these teams—no matter where they are.
ProductPlan’s app lets you share the right roadmaps with the right team
members and give them the ability to add comments or questions, open
chat threads, and even @mention colleagues to ensure the right people are
engaged in the discussion.

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10
You’ll Build Better Products!
Any of these benefits should be enough to persuade you at least to sign up
for our free trial.

But taken together, we hope you can see how many workflow
improvements this roadmapping app can create for your cross-functional
team and how these improvements work together to help your team
produce more successful products.

TIME SUCK TO TIME SAVE: SPREADSHEETS VS. ROADMAPS 27

Conclusion
It’s Been Great Spreadsheets, but We Need To Move On

Your spreadsheet tool had its time. It served your product team as well as
you could hope, considering it doesn't tell a high-level, visual story about
strategy or vision. But until recently, you and your product colleagues had
no choice.

Fortunately, though, now you do. You live in the era of SaaS-based roadmap
software—designed by product managers for product managers. The
award-winning roadmap app from ProductPlan helps world-dominating
businesses—including Coca-Cola, Facebook, Adobe, Microsoft, and
Spotify—cultivate their incredible product stories.

Now it's time to let our app do the same for your products.

Oh, and if you're feeling hesitant about switching to our app because you've
already invested so much time building your spreadsheet roadmap, we can
help you with that as well. Once you've signed up for your free trial, you can
import your spreadsheet data into your new web-based product roadmap.
About ProductPlan
ProductPlan makes it easy for teams of all sizes to build beautiful
roadmaps. Thousands of product managers worldwide–including teams
from Nike, Microsoft, and Spotify–trust ProductPlan to help them visualize
and share their strategies across their entire organization. With our
intuitive features, product managers spend less time building roadmaps
and more time shipping products.

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