Building the right product often comes down to balancing what customers say they want with what your business aims to achieve. Jira helps bridge these competing demands by giving product managers a unified system for prioritizing, planning, and executing work with clarity. From native planning tools to purpose-built roadmapping apps and integrations, Jira becomes the connective tissue between customer input and roadmap execution. Let’s break down how product managers use Jira to create successful product plans.
Native Jira Roadmapping
Jira offers some basic roadmapping capabilities called Timelines. These Timelines are built into Jira Cloud for team-level planning. They are a simple tool for visualizing Epics and Issues over time, showing dependencies, and tracking progress within a single project. They work well for small teams needing immediate visualization.
Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps)
While Timelines are as basic as it gets, Jira Premium and Enterprise offer Advanced Planning, delivered through Jira Plans. This feature gives product managers, engineering leaders, and cross-functional teams a shared, real-time view of priorities, capacity, and timelines.
What is Advanced Planning in Jira?
Advanced planning is a set of enterprise capabilities that allow teams to visualize, model, and align large-scale work across multiple teams. Within a Plan, PMs can:
- Schedule work and sequence delivery
- Map dependencies across initiatives
- Allocate team capacity
- Build and compare “what-if” scenarios
- Connect roadmap items to broader business goals
- Experiment in a sandbox before publishing changes
Plans pull live Jira data from boards, spaces, and filters, bringing customer feedback, engineering work, and strategic priorities into one single source of truth.
Marketplace Apps that Strengthen Roadmapping in Jira
While Jira’s native capabilities are powerful, many PMs enrich their planning experience through Atlassian Marketplace apps. These tools enhance feedback collection, visualization, prioritization, and communication. Here are some of our picks:
BigPicture
A favorite for PMOs and large enterprises, BigPicture gives product managers a unified Gantt workspace to plan and manage complex initiatives. It supports PI and sprint planning for SAFe and offers hierarchical portfolio structures through its Box framework. In addition to this, it includes robust resource allocation and cross-team dependency mapping. These capabilities make BigPicture an excellent fit for organizations operating in hybrid Agile-Waterfall environments that require both structure and flexibility.
Productboard for Jira
Productboard helps product managers bring customer insights directly into their planning process by capturing input from sales, customer success, and interviews. Its prioritization frameworks allow teams to score features objectively and tie them to broader business outcomes and initiatives. Only validated features are synced to Jira for execution, creating a clean separation between idea triage and engineering delivery. It is ideal for feedback-heavy organizations, always keeping teams aligned on what matters most.
Aha!
Aha! Roadmaps provides a full product management suite that includes strategic planning, goal and initiative development, and intuitive drag-and-drop timelines with dependency mapping. Its real-time Jira syncing ensures product and engineering teams stay aligned as work evolves. This makes Aha! an excellent choice for organizations managing multiple product lines that need a structured approach to strategic roadmapping and execution.
Strategic Roadmaps for Jira (formerly Roadmunk)
Strategic Roadmaps by Tempo is known for its highly flexible visualization options. These options enable product managers to build stakeholder-ready roadmaps tailored to different audiences. The tool supports prioritization frameworks like RICE and MoSCoW and syncs epics and portfolio items directly with Jira to maintain alignment across teams. It is especially valuable for organizations that need clear, polished communication for executive, cross-functional, and customer-facing stakeholders.
Easy Agile Roadmaps
Easy Agile Roadmaps is a simple, intuitive Jira-native app designed for teams that want lightweight, visual planning directly inside Jira. It supports sprint and release planning, thematic grouping, and visualizations that connect outcomes to goals. Due to its ability to easily share non-technical roadmap updates, it is a natural fit for Scrum and Kanban teams.
Gantt Charts for Structure PPM
Gantt Charts for Structure PPM offers advanced capabilities for teams that require hierarchical planning across large portfolios. It allows users to build complex Gantt visualizations, roll up portfolio structures, track utilization and workloads, and compare schedules against actual progress. This makes it ideal for organizations that need custom hierarchical views and detailed project planning beyond Jira’s native functionality.
Balancing Customer Feedback and Roadmap Priorities with SPK and Atlassian
While these integrations help with roadmapping, SPK and Associates can design a scalable Jira roadmapping ecosystem for your product, engineering, PMO, and business teams. We help teams configure Jira Plans, hierarchies, workflows, and custom fields so customer feedback naturally flows into prioritized, actionable work. Additionally, we help with integrations and ensure cross-team visibility. Our team always prioritizes governance while allowing for a quicker product delivery time.
Roadmapping Smarter with Jira
Balancing customer feedback with roadmap priorities is one of the hardest parts of product management. Jira provides the infrastructure to make it possible. Plans give PMs a native space to prioritize across teams while Marketplace apps enrich visibility, prioritization, and communication. With SPK’s expertise, teams gain a cohesive planning ecosystem that connects feedback, strategy, and execution into one aligned process. If you want to improve roadmap predictability, unify feedback loops, and streamline cross-team planning, SPK and Associates can help. Contact us today to align your goals.
