Roadmap

What it does

Behaviours, not fields. Choosing between two modules is choosing between these.

Coarse enough to survive a plan changing, which is what makes it publishable.

Groups by quarter or release rather than date, so it does not become a list of apologies.

The same rows serve a public page and an internal review.

How it works

1
Items are grouped by period rather than dated, which is what makes the page publishable.
2
Status changes as work lands, and the agent answers when will you have X from these rows.
3
Shipped items stay visible, because a roadmap with no history looks like it never delivers.
4
Dropped is a status rather than a deletion, so a reversal is honest.

Best for

A schedule someone reads top to bottom — a run-of-show, an itinerary.

Not the right choice for

Comparing parallel workstreams; that is a Gantt.

What a row holds

Every field, and what the agent listens for to fill it — which is the difference between a page you type into and one that fills itself.

Field	Type	Filled from
Quarterrequired	text	The period. Deliberately coarse — a quarter survives a plan changing.
Itemrequired	text	What is coming, at a resolution an outsider can follow.
Statusrequired	choice	Where it stands. Shipped, In progress, Planned, or Dropped.

What it does not do

A module chosen for something it cannot do costs more than one that was never offered.

No dates, on purpose. Anyone needing a date wants Milestones or a Gantt chart.
No dependencies or sizing — this is communication, not planning.
Public by default, so anything commercially sensitive does not belong here.
Nothing links a roadmap item to the work delivering it.

Before it works

What you have to provide, if anything.

Nothing. Three items is a usable roadmap.
Decide early whether it is public; the wording changes completely.

In practice

A software team that had stopped publishing dates after missing three.

“Team accounts in Q4, public API sometime after.”

What was said to the agent

What the agent built

Two quarters of items with statuses, no day-level dates.

What changed

The roadmap went back on the site. Two customers stopped asking monthly because the answer was visible.

Better with

These do a different job on the same data. An agent can have all of them.

MilestonesLive

Progress needs reporting to someone who is not doing the work and does not want the task-level detail.

SprintsLive

The team works in fixed iterations and needs to see what was committed against what actually landed.

ReportsLive

Someone outside the day-to-day needs the picture periodically, with interpretation rather than raw figures.

Who uses this page

Startup founder

Handles the inbound you have no time for, so early interest does not go cold.

Questions

What data does the Roadmap page use?

It reads milestone records the agent has collected. Milestones across quarters/phases. Nothing has to be imported first — the page appears once there is something to show.

Do I have to build or configure it?

No. You describe what you need in a sentence and the agent chooses the view and fills it. Custom pages exist for the cases no built-in view covers, and those are reviewed before they go live.

When is a timeline the wrong choice?

Comparing parallel workstreams; that is a Gantt. It is best for: a schedule someone reads top to bottom — a run-of-show, an itinerary.

Does it stay up to date?

Yes. The page is a view over the data rather than a copy of it, so anything the agent learns afterwards shows up without a rebuild or a re-import.