6 SaaS Public Product Roadmap Examples

Ever wondered why some tech companies nail product development while others leave their users guessing? You can find some answers in, which companies publicly broadcast their roadmaps, which is a pretty effective marketing tool as well as one that actually helps product direction, feedback and engagement. It’s also crucial for building trust with users and bringing them along for the journey.

However, it can be a double edged sword, too much information will likely, from my experience, not be the best for your developers. If you announce features with a strict deadline, all you’re doing to do is overpromise and underdeliver.

Even small firms can benefit from a public roadmap (something I’ll go into greater depth in our next blog post) but start High level and engage your users to actually help you prioritise. Things like a feature leader board, can you help engagement but you needn’t commit to all, and also help you start conversations.

What is a Public Product Roadmap?

A public product roadmap can serve as a strategic communication tool that publicly outlines your product plans. It’s almost always a visual representation reveals what a company is currently working on, recent releases, and their general product strategy—which anyone can freely view.

Benefits of Public Roadmaps

• Builds trust and loyalty - According to Bettermode 94% of consumers remain loyal to brands offering complete transparency.

• Encourages further feedback - Sometimes it can be quite hard getting customers to suggest improvements, but when it’s less personalised customers can be more honest about what they need and vote on items they want prioritised, especially in cases where they haven’t so far.

• Reduces support inquiries - Acts as a reference point for common questions about future plans (which I’m sure you can all attest to happen a lot! Certainly does for us!)

• Can be a useful Funnel to attract new customers - Simply put, if a user is looking to swap out from an exisiting service that offers a similar product and see you’re prioritising something their current provider isn’t it can be a good excuse for them to jump ship to you.

1. GitHub’s Public Roadmap

Github's Public Roadmap

GitHub stands out among public product roadmap examples with its remarkably straightforward approach to sharing development plans. It doesn’t hurt that GitHub’s platform is perfectly setup to do this given its use case and a public roadmap are pretty close to identical.

However just because you may not have built your own Kanban’s doesn’t mean you can’t embed a Notion/Airtable or Trello to similar affect.

Key Features

Github’s roadmap is a pretty clean Kanban segmented by quarters, providing users a clear timeline of upcoming developments. Each item on the board links to a detailed issue containing crucial information about:

• What feature is being developed

• Why it’s important

• Expected delivery timeframe

• How the feature will likely function

The roadmap uses a comprehensive labeling system that indicates release phases (preview, general availability), feature areas, and deployment models. Which makes a pretty large product map highly filterable.

What Makes It Effective

The brilliance of GitHub’s approach lies in its simplicity and transparency. As Petra Ivanigova noted, “It’s a masterclass in clarity” The roadmap succeeds according to Petra because:

• “It sets clear expectations”

• It earns trust through transparent communication “Transparency doesn’t mean chaos. It means you’re confident enough to show the messy middle.”

• It maintains momentum by publicly displaying progress “Public work has a quiet accountability. No one wants their task lingering in “In Progress” for six months.”

Takeaways for Your Business

When creating your own public roadmap, consider these lessons from GitHub:

• Simplify organisation - Arrange items chronologically by quarter rather than specific dates (also give you more breathing room, its clear Git understand development better than most.)

• Create a clear labelling system - Help users quickly find information relevant to them

• Balance detail with clarity - Provide enough information without overwhelming users

2. Bracket’s Product Roadmap

Bracket's Public Roadmap

Bracket is a modern text editor app for front end developers and designers to work in browser. Bracket's roadmap uses a simple Trello board broken down into To be reviewed, community backlog, product backlog, nominations and then finally shipped products.

What Makes It Effective

Using a tool pretty much everyone in the world is under 70 knows is a pretty easy way to communicate to the wider world about what is happening in the next years. It’s key areas are:

• It includes an icebox, which just shows they’re honest about their ability to deliver yet still show’s they’ll review every idea before making a decision

• Community backlog, which is great for showing they value the communities ideas and have actually began to implement them, many of which have statuses showing how many steps are completed and what is yet to be started

• It’s messy, but not in a bad way, it shows the real world workings without overloading. I wasn’t familiar with Bracket before this but it didn’t take me long to see what they were doing and get a grip on what it could mean

Takeaways for Your Business

When implementing a Trello for your roadmap strategy:

• Start with a clear welcome card explaining how your roadmap works and how users should interact with it

• Like Bracket’s Trello it’s super handy to use colour coding indicating the status of the task like “almost done” in red for them

• Brackets also has contributor comments visible alongside the number of steps completed

• Implement the voting system to prioritise features based on actual user demand

3.Buffer’s Public Roadmap

Buffer's Public Roadmap

Buffer were early in social media management game, and grew to be very successful embracing community-driven development through its public roadmap. Buffer’s transparent roadmap has since become a hallmark of their company philosophy and influenced 1000s of companies on how to be radically transparent.

Key Features

Buffer’s public roadmap has changed a lot since its initial implementation 8 years ago on Trello. They’ve developed their own boards now integrated into Buffer’s platform.

• Clear Status Categorisation - The roadmap uses intuitive columns, new, thinking about it and crucially “Blocked by API limitation” which is really useful to see in some cases, features that seem like a good idea aren’t viable technically.

• Community Voting System - Anyone with an account can vote on feature ideas, allowing the most popular suggestions to gain traction and be prioritised.

• Integrated Feedback Loop - Users can submit suggestions through a dedicated portal (now using featureOS after previously using Trello) and automatically receive updates when their suggestion’s status changes

• Accessible Communication - The roadmap uses language I, as a non dev, can understand.

• Timing - for those of you worried about what I mentioned earlier, overpromising and underdelivering, then Buffer’s solved that, without much indication on “when” development teams aren’t under crazy stress to make unreasonable deadlines.

What Makes It Effective

Buffer’s approach succeeds primarily because it places community at the center of their development process.

First, it builds trust with users by showing exactly what’s being developed and why.

Second, the commenting and engagement features provide valuable data for Buffer’s product team regarding user preferences. The roadmap also serves as a central hub for community discussion about upcoming features.

Takeaways for Your Business

When designing your own public roadmap, consider these things from Buffer’s approach:

• Embrace community feedback - Create mechanisms for users to vote on and suggest features directly.

• Use accessible language - Make your roadmap understandable to non-technical users.

• Maintain transparency - Share both successes and limitations or issues openly.

• Stay consistent - keep it regular stupid! To borrow from Clinton.

4.WP Fusion’s Public Roadmap

WP Fusion's Public Roadmap

WP Fusion (EchoDash’s Founder Jack is also the founder behind WP Fusion ) is a household name in the WP community, designed to integrate WordPress sites with CRMs and email marketing tools. Whilst not strictly as SaaS tool, they’ve done a great job.

Key Features

WP Fusion has learn the lessons from some of the bigger guys on the list with most of the best features of all the others, but keeping the boards simple to understand and quickly digestible. Unlike many others there are 3 buckets, Planned, Started and Completed. He’s also included a link to feature requests, and a changelog. I’ll get into why this system is very effective below:

• Simplicity - With planned, started and completed, it’s really easy to understand no scrolling to understand more. Each of these buckets has comments, upvotes and categories

• Seperate feature voting - separating whats on the roadmap from the blog style page that allows users to request and vote on features clearly divides what’s 100% coming and what is still in the request stage. It allows WP Fusion to prioritise easily those with the most votes, without mudding the water on what is happening and what’s still in ‘request’ mode.

• Changelog - Having again another place for the changelog, that clearly highlights changes to exisiting features, bug fixes and delivered works, makes these interconnected but seperate systems easier to navigate, understand and work with for the WP Fusion team. To be honest I had no idea what the version numbers meant but that’s clearly explained so that even a code illiterate like me, could easily get what all these decimals meant.

What Makes It Effective

In a word, simplicity, it’s really easy to follow as a lamen, and its a system that doesn’t need a development team of 5 to manage and that makes it great for smaller teams.

Takeaways for Your Business

-Think about dividing features, roadmap and change updates** - Clearly show what’s coming, what’s rolling out, and what’s completed and nothing superfluous

-Make documentation great again** - The way each feature and category takes you to a place to learn more means as a user I can really understand a lot without needing to reach out, masterclass in communications that build user trust and make great product.

-Update regularly - Having dates when each roadmap item is updated is pretty smart, it shows progress but doesn’t tie you down to delivery dates.

5. Notion’s Public Roadmap

Notions's Not Roadmap

I’m putting Notion in here for a couple reasons, one I love the product, it’s replaced 10 other tools for me and wanted to highlight how to create value without having a public roadmap. As Notion maintains only a list of new features and a list of older shipped features.

Key Features

Notion’s alternative to everyone else’s public product roadmap has some useful features worth replicating if public roadmaps don’t work for you.

• Chronological Update History - Their “What’s New” page provides dated entries of feature additions, from significant updates like “Synced Blocks” to smaller improvements like “Better text editing”

• Template Marketplace - Rather than just displaying their own roadmap, Notion offers customisable roadmap templates for other businesses to adapt for their needs

• Notion’s templates allow users to organise projects by epics, sprints, tasks, and bugs, with multiple database views customised for different stakeholders.

What Makes It Effective

Notion’s different approach yields impressive results - their commitment to community-led growth and transparency apparently contributed to a 22% increase in user referrals and a huge NPS of 76. They can get away with this approach as they ship fast!

Furthermore, by not committing to specific future dates, Notion avoids the common pitfall of missed deadlines that disappoint users. Instead, they focus on delivering value, then announcing it afterward—building credibility through consistent execution.

Takeaways for Your Business

When considering your transparent product planning strategy:

• Consider whether a traditional roadmap fits your development style

• Explore alternative transparency models like Notion’s “What’s New” approach

• Utilise Notion’s more flexible templates to structure your planning process (no need to use Trello if it doesn’t work for you)

Ultimately, Notion demonstrates that successful public roadmaps can come in different forms.

6. Softr’s Public Product Roadmap

Softr's Public Roadmap

Softr is another smaller or lesser known company on the list (albeit they’re killing it , they just aren’t as big as some of the others.) Softr’s SaaS product roadmap is fairly similar to WP Fusion but they’re another one that’s using their own tool (Dog fooding ) to make a public roadmap.

Key Features

• Now Available - I love that anything that shows me an image. That’s what Softr does to differentiate things they’ve shipped and I can see rather than read why I should care.

• Shows off their tool - Using Softr to dog food their roadmap is really cool, because its setup to be super flexible but can do basic interfaces or more complex ones.

What Makes It Effective

It’s even more of a marketing tool than many of the others, because it shows off Softr’s tool which turns an Airtable into a beautiful front end. So not only does it communicate what’s coming, it shows you how their product works and how you could use it.

Takeaways for Your Business

When implementing your own public roadmap strategy, consider these lessons from Softr:

• Use Images - If you want to show off what you’ve built on your public roadmap, seeing images helps, they don’t say “a picture is worth a thousand words”for nothing. This is the only public product roadmap that has this in the product roadmap and it draws the eye to what’s new.

• Show off - Softr not only gets to communicate about their roadmap but shows off their product too, if you can utilise apart of what you’re building to do this (and not everyone can) it’s an easy win. Softr keeps it pretty simple whilst adding their own style into a product roadmap that shows even though 1000s of these exist, you can still do it in a way that’ll work for you and be recognised!

Transparency Level Considerations

Finding the right transparency balance is crucial for your public roadmap. Too much detail might lead to the old overpromise and underdeliver (which I’ve definitely been on both sides of), yet too little and it’s hardly a useful tool for you or your users.

Update Frequency

Regular roadmap updates are pretty darn useful for maintaining relevance and user trust and also for holding yourself accountable. Among teams reporting the highest success rates, weekly updates were most common (36%)

At minimum, product roadmaps require quarterly reviews though some businesses may benefit from monthly drops, depending on your development speed. Each update should reflect current priorities, recent achievements, and shifting market conditions. As a result, your roadmap remains a dynamic document rather than a stagnant one.

User Feedback Integration

Effective roadmaps incorporate user feedback in some form or fashion, WP Fusion shows it need not be on your roadmap as does Notion.

• Collect input through multiple channels (surveys, interviews, support interactions)

• Categorise feedback to identify patterns and recurring needs

• Prioritise based obviously on number of interested users, upvotes, interactions or whatever metric fits your business best.

Visual Design Elements

The presentation of your roadmap significantly affects its usefulness . Equally important as content is how that content is organised. A well-designed roadmap should be clear and intuitive, avoiding anything too in the weeds. Three buckets Not started, doing, done works pretty well for most.

Conclusion

Public product roadmaps serve as useful tools for engagement and building trust and fostering connections with users. When setting one up you need to consider your audience, development pace, and transparency goals. Regular updates, clear visuals, and active user feedback help maintain an effective roadmap.

Most importantly, public roadmaps should reflect your company’s actual commitment to transparency, so if you don’t feel it’s a fit, it probably won’t be. Teams that thoughtfully implement these tools, while remaining flexible enough to adapt based on user needs, often see significant improvements in customer satisfaction.

Start small, stay consistent, and remember that your roadmap exists to communicate and connect with your userbase, no matter how big.