// ultimate guide · roadmap

How to Get Started with a Public Product Roadmap

Tips & Best practices

Public product roadmaps are essential for companies aiming to build transparency and trust with their customers. They offer a clear view of upcoming releases and open the door to meaningful conversations, helping customers feel informed and engaged.

Today's users expect openness. A well-crafted public product roadmap shows your commitment to transparency and keeps your audience aligned with your future plans. It's a powerful tool that benefits both product teams and customers — and it should be a core part of any product strategy.

Ready to bring your product vision to life? Read on to learn why product roadmaps matter, how to build one, and tips for getting started.

Why is it important to create a public roadmap?

A public product roadmap is a shared source of truth that outlines your product's direction, vision, priorities, and progress. It can be used in many impactful ways:

• Builds trust — Shows transparency around priorities and direction.
• Shows commitment — Communicates what you're working on to improve the product.
• Encourages feedback — Invites users to contribute and helps validate decisions.
• Creates accountability — Public plans drive focus and follow-through.
• Aligns teams — Supports sales, marketing, and support with clear messaging.
• Boosts adoption — Reassures potential customers their needs are being addressed.
• Fosters connection — Turns product planning into a shared, open conversation.
• Keeps everyone in the loop — Shows what's been done and what's coming next.

The Ducalis Roadmap helps product teams plan, track, and visualize upcoming work — while keeping users informed and engaged.

It can also be helpful to see a real product roadmap in action before you start creating your own — feel free to check out our roadmap.

Create Branded User Voting Boards

At Ducalis, you can create voting boards (a place for collecting users feedback) for various types of feedback — feature requests, bug reports, general suggestions, and more. Users can submit new feedback, upvote existing ideas, comment, and engage in discussions. A voting board serves as a centralized place to collect feedback from different sources like emails, spreadsheets, Discord, Mattermost, Telegram & Slack channels, or backlog tasks — either publicly or privately.

A voting board isn't just for collecting feedback; it also functions as your Roadmap, showcasing your product development progress.

You can make your Roadmap instantly recognizable by customizing it to match your brand. Add your logo, favicon, name, theme, languages and even use a custom domain to deliver a seamless, professional experience for your customers.

Prioritize and Update the Status of Roadmap Ideas

The Roadmap is your central hub for visualizing your backlog, prioritizing features, and tracking development progress. It helps you stay organized, communicate clearly with stakeholders, and focus on what matters most.

Create Ideas on the Roadmap

Turn backlog issues into roadmap ideas by connecting your project management tools — such as Jira Cloud, Jira Server, Asana, Trello, ClickUp, YouTrack, Linear, GitHub — and by using AI to generate them.

Prioritize Backlog and Feedback

Prioritizing feedback ensures the most valuable features get built first. Ducalis supports popular prioritization frameworks like RICE, WSJF, Eisenhower Matrix and more.

Create Custom Status Columns

Use existing status options or create custom ones for your roadmap. When a roadmap item's status changes, Ducalis automatically notifies relevant stakeholders via email. To automate roadmap updates, you can also set up custom rules.

Share your Roadmap

Once your roadmap is complete, you can share it to demonstrate your commitment to improving the user experience and to encourage more feedback.

Share a link to your voting board and product roadmap with users to increase transparency and accountability by clearly communicating what your team is working on — and why.

Embed the Roadmap — Set it up in 3 minutes or less

Embedding your roadmap is a great way to share it with customers on your website or within your product. It allows users to access the roadmap directly from their account, making it feel like a seamless part of your application.

Showcase Progress & Announce Updates

A product roadmap is a living document. Be sure to update it regularly to reflect progress, user feedback, or changes in strategy. The main goal of a public product roadmap is to maintain transparency and foster better communication with your users.

Ducalis.io also offers a product changelog solution allowing you to announce new releases and updates using a changelog widget, tags, and a standalone product updates page.

Keep Customers in the Loop

Send notifications to your customers and stakeholders when their ideas are moved to another status, receive comments, or are marked as done.

Choose the Right Roadmap for Your Audience: Internal vs. External

Depending on your audience, there are two main types of product roadmaps: external (public) and internal (private).

• External Roadmap — Customer-facing roadmap designed for people outside your company — such as customers, industry experts, and influencers. Its main goal is to showcase upcoming features that align with your audience's needs. There's no need to share everything — focus on value and benefits, not technical details. Highlight the value and benefits these features will bring to your users to keep them informed, engaged, and excited about what's coming next.
• Internal product roadmap — Outlines upcoming features, technical improvements, and key milestones. It often includes release dates, architectural upgrades, and behind-the-scenes work needed to scale the product.

Which teams use Roadmaps?

Roadmaps can take various forms and serve different audiences.

• Public (External) Roadmap — These roadmaps should generate excitement among customers about what's coming next. They should be visually appealing and easy to understand, offering a high-level view of upcoming features and key problem areas to spark interest in the product's direction.
• Roadmap for the Development Team — Helps dev teams understand product strategy, goals, and prioritization. Typically includes key milestones, target release dates, and the value being delivered.
• Roadmap for Executives — Highlights how team initiatives align with high-level company goals and key metrics. Usually organized by month or quarter, focusing on strategic progress rather than technical details.
• Roadmap for Sales and Marketing — Showcases upcoming features and their customer benefits, often noting which customers are interested. Designed to support sales conversations without overpromising, and should align product goals with broader marketing objectives.

Choose a Public Roadmap Tool

The Ducalis Roadmap is a powerful tool that helps product development teams plan, track, and visualize their upcoming tasks and projects. It's also a great way to keep end users informed and interested.

• You can create highly customized roadmaps — whether it's for internal planning, public transparency, or anything in between.
• With unlimited filtering options, you have complete control over what's shown on each roadmap, right down to individual columns.
• If you use an issue management tool like Linear or Jira, our integrations can automatically sync your development queue with the roadmaps. Using this with public roadmaps is a great way to automatically keep users updated about their requests, for example.
• You can also embed a public roadmap into your app or website using different available methods.

Unlike other tools, Ducalis.io is more than just a product roadmap tool. From capturing ideas and feedback to prioritizing, sharing public plans via roadmaps, announcing product releases, and automating release notes, you can complete the entire feedback cycle in one place.