Roadmaps — Overview & Concepts
What they are, why they matter, and how they fit into Lodestone
What Is a Roadmap?
A Roadmap in Lodestone is a narrative representation of a product plan, expressed as a hierarchy and visualized as a sunburst chart. It exists to answer two questions for your organization:
- WHAT are we building?
- WHY are we building these things instead of others?
Lodestone Roadmaps are not timelines, Gantt charts, or task boards. They don't show dates or delivery schedules — that's what Releases are for. A Roadmap explains intent and priorities; a Release tracks progress and timing.
The Sunburst Chart
The sunburst is Lodestone's signature visualization. It's best understood as a traditional org chart hierarchy curled into a circle:
- The center ring holds the highest-level items — your goals, themes, or top-level groupings
- Each outward ring represents a deeper level of detail
- Segments nest within their parent segments, so the visual hierarchy mirrors your planning hierarchy
The result is a single image that makes it immediately clear how tactical work connects to strategic intent — something a swim lane or spreadsheet can't do at a glance.
The sunburst updates in real time as you add or rearrange items, so you always see your plan taking shape as you build it.
What Makes Lodestone Roadmaps Different
Two things set Lodestone Roadmaps apart from most roadmap tools:
1. Hierarchy over timelines
Most roadmap tools organize by time — quarters, swimlanes, milestones. Lodestone organizes by meaning. The hierarchy in the sunburst shows how your work rolls up, not when it ships.
2. Built to be presented
When you export a Roadmap as a full PowerPoint presentation, Lodestone generates a slide for every item at every level of the hierarchy — walking through the plan section by section, telling a coherent story. The roadmap isn't just visualized; it's packaged for an audience.
Key Concepts
Hierarchy
Roadmap items are organized in a parent-child structure. A parent item groups its children; children inherit their parent's context. There is no limit to how many levels deep you can nest — the sunburst adds rings as you go.
Items and Features
Every item you add to a Roadmap starts life as a Feature. When an item becomes a parent (i.e. something is nested beneath it), it transforms into a grouping label — it disappears from the Feature backlog and becomes a tag applied to its children. Child Features inherit their parent and grandparent items as tags, preserving hierarchy context across the platform.
Color
Each Roadmap item has a color, which you set. Colors propagate from parent to child, visually grouping related work in the sunburst. Color is a storytelling tool — it helps audiences see which segments belong together at a glance.
Contextual Sizing and Coloring
Beyond the structural hierarchy and color families, you can layer additional meaning onto the outermost ring (where Features sit) by sizing and coloring segments based on their Value or Effort scores. This makes tradeoffs visible without changing the underlying structure.
Deprioritized Items
Roadmaps are expected to evolve. Rather than deleting items that don't make the cut, Lodestone encourages keeping deprioritized items visible in a separate section. This tells a richer story — not just what you're building, but what you've consciously decided not to build right now.
How Roadmaps Relate to the Rest of Lodestone
| Object | Relationship |
|---|---|
| Features | Features are the building blocks of every Roadmap. The same Feature can appear in multiple Roadmaps simultaneously. |
| Releases | Roadmaps answer WHAT and WHY. Releases answer WHEN. A common pattern is to define intent in a Roadmap and track execution in a Release. |
| Strategy | Roadmaps represent near-to-medium term plans. Strategy covers longer-horizon investment decisions and tradeoffs. |
| Documents | Opportunity Canvases for Features in a Roadmap are automatically collected and appended to the full PPT export. |
Who Can Create Roadmaps
Any workspace member can create a Roadmap — it is not restricted to admins. A workspace can have multiple Roadmaps, and there is no limit on how many you create.
Archiving Roadmaps
Roadmaps can be archived when they're no longer active. Archiving a Roadmap has no impact on the Features within it — they remain in the Feature backlog as normal. Archived Roadmaps are no longer shown in the active list but are preserved for reference.
Next: How-tos & Workflows — step-by-step guides for building, editing, and exporting Roadmaps.