Introducing the New and Improved ZenHub Roadmaps

Back in November 2019, we launched ZenHub Roadmaps — the first (and still, only) product roadmapping solution built inside of GitHub. Roadmaps quickly became a core part of how teams organized and tracked their key initiatives, and in just a little over six months since their debut, the ZenHub community has created nearly nine-thousand ZenHub Projects and more than ten times that number of Epics. That’s a lot of shipping!

Today we’re excited to announce three major improvements to help teams understand progress, meet project deadlines, and communicate timelines even more easily:

• Red, Yellow, Green project status
• Predicted end dates for Epics
• Organization-wide portfolio view

Red, Yellow, Green Project Status

As teams of early adopters started socializing their roadmaps with the rest of their organization, we heard from users that it wasn’t always easy for external stakeholders to understand the progress of key initiatives in the roadmap. Based on this feedback, we’ve introduced an option to enable color-coded projects as determined by their progress.

A red, yellow, or green color instantly indicates status, communicating whether a project is on track (green), at-risk (yellow), or falling behind (red). This change gives both teams and project stakeholders the ability to understand at-risk projects and more quickly address potential delays and bottlenecks before they become blockers for the team.

Predicted end dates for Epics

Whether it’s coming from leadership, customers, or other stakeholders, software teams are constantly being asked the question *“when will this be done?”*. Without proper data, answering this question can prove to be tricky. As a result, teams often end up committing to unrealistic timelines or having to make last-minute scope cuts in order to finish “on time”.

Today we’re adding the option for teams to enable “predicted end dates” for Epics in their Roadmaps. Predicted end dates provide a visual indication when a project is running behind schedule and can help teams proactively have conversations around reducing scope. The result is not only more confident estimates but fewer delays and missed deadlines.

Organization-wide portfolio view

Our first iteration of ZenHub Roadmaps allowed users to create roadmaps that were connected to a ZenHub Workspace. While this proved to be a great solution for teams, many managers and executive stakeholders that we spoke with wanted to be able to see a roll-up of key projects across all of the teams within their portfolio in a single view.

Based on that feedback, we’re launching the ability to create a roadmap that includes Zenhub Projects and Epics from any repo within a GitHub organization. This effectively allows teams to create a single unified view of all the key projects and initiatives. Combined with color coding and predicted end dates this puts an end to late projects and status chasing.

For teams using ZenHub.com, all three of these enhancements are available starting today and are included as part of your existing subscription. For teams using our on-premise offering — ZenHub Enterprise — we’re planning to make these new features available in our next release (coming soon). If your team isn’t currently using ZenHub, you can get started building your organization’s roadmap in minutes with a free 14-day trial.

Finally, all of today’s enhancements were inspired through conversations with our community, and we’d like to take the opportunity to thank you for your continued support — even in times as uncertain and challenging as these.

Stay safe.
— the ZenHub team