How to Create a Roadmap in Shorter Loop?

A roadmap isn’t just a timeline. It’s your team’s visual plan to turn strategy into action. In Shorter Loop, building a roadmap is flexible, intuitive, and designed to support your workflow, whether you're planning by timeline, sprint, theme, value, or goals.

Shorter Loop supports various types of Roadmaps: timeline-based, theme-based, sprint-based, value-based, and objective-based.

The most important part is creating a roadmap in Shorter Loop is a seamless and agile process. You can create a roadmap with the work items pulled from Jira and add them to the roadmap.

Why It’s Important to Have an Integrated Roadmap

An integrated roadmap connects your strategy, planning, and execution in one place, so everyone stays aligned and focused.

Aligns teams around shared goals

Links strategy directly to delivery

Simplifies cross-functional collaboration

Tracks progress across all levels, executive and teams

Reduces tool-switching and confusion

Understanding Roadmap Types

Shorter Loop offers both an Org Roadmap for a holistic view and multiple focused roadmaps for smaller achievements:

Org Roadmap: Provides a top-level, unified strategy.

Team/Product Roadmaps: Focus on specific goals and detailed execution.

How to Create a Roadmap

Step 1 - Access to the Roadmap Section

From your dashboard, move to the sidebar on the left.

Under the “Strategy” section, click on Roadmap.

This opens your roadmap workspace of the org roadmap, your canvas to lay out objectives, features, and timelines.

Step 2 - Name Your Roadmap & Set the Objective

You will land on the OrgRoadmap by default.

At the top of your roadmap screen:

Rename the default name to something meaningful.

It's important to give name to the new roadmap to start working it.

Add a clear objective that tells everyone what this roadmap is trying to achieve.

Note on Org vs. Team Roadmaps:

In Shorter Loop, you can create multiple roadmaps based on your needs.

- The Org Roadmap gives a holistic view of your organization's long-term objectives, connecting multiple products and teams under one strategic direction.

- Other individual roadmaps are ideal for team-level planning, feature launches, or short-term initiatives. They help you track smaller achievements that contribute to the big picture.

Tip for team Roadmaps' objective:

Your objective should reflect the product goal or business outcome you want to reach with this roadmap.

Step 3: Choose the Right Time Intervals

Decide how you want to organize time in your roadmap:

Quarterly intervals for strategic, long-term goals

Monthly intervals for mid-sized planning

Sprint-based intervals for agile teams working in 1–3 week cycles

Once you choose the format, add time blocks (called “intervals”) to your roadmap. You can add as many as you need.

You can also create sub-intervals under any main interval.

For example: if your main interval is 2025Q1, you can break it down into 2025Q1.1, 2025Q1.2, 2025Q1.3, etc., for more granular planning.

Step 4: Add Work Items to the Timeline

All your validated Work Items will appear on the right side panel.

Click the Work Items dropdown.

Drag and drop relevant items into the correct time interval on your roadmap.

Each item represents a feature, epic, or initiative that helps you reach your objective.

You can also add Objectives and Backlog Work Items directly using the Artifacts button at the top of the roadmap. No need to switch screens—just drop them in from right where you're working.

Step 5: Use Swimlanes to Organize Work Visually

Swimlanes let you group tasks based on categories like:

Departments (Design, Dev, QA)

Phases (Ideation, Build, Launch)

Initiatives (Bugs, Improvements, New Features)

Just click “Add Swimlane” and name it accordingly. You can create as many as needed based on how your team works.

Example: A product development roadmap might use swimlanes like:Ideation → Design → Development → Testing → QA → Launch → Monitoring

Step 6: Use Filters to View What Matters

Roadmaps can get big fast. Filters help you focus on exactly what you need to see:

Sort by status — filter work items that are:

To-do

In-progress

Done

Filter by work item type — view only:

Epics

Features

User Stories

These filters help reduce visual clutter and give you a personalized, focused view of your roadmap.

Once your roadmap is ready:

Share it with your team or stakeholders for live visibility

Download it as a PDF if you need to include it in presentations

Export it as an image to easily embed in reports or docs

This makes your roadmap easy to distribute, review, and collaborate on, no matter the audience.

Why It’s Important to Have an Integrated Roadmap#

Understanding Roadmap Types#

How to Create a Roadmap#

Step 1 - Access to the Roadmap Section#

Step 2 - Name Your Roadmap & Set the Objective#

Step 3: Choose the Right Time Intervals#

Step 4: Add Work Items to the Timeline#

Step 5: Use Swimlanes to Organize Work Visually#

Step 6: Use Filters to View What Matters#

Step 7: Share and Export#