How to manage a roadmap board?

Read how you can set up Custom domain for your roadmap portal.

Creating the roadmap board

  • As a Jira service project administrator, navigate to a service project.

  • In the project menu, click on Roadmap portal in the left-hand navigation. 

  • At the top right corner, click on Add board.

Roadmap board set up is split into 3 tabs

  • Configurations

  • Tabs & columns

  • Field mappings & filters

Each one is explained in detail below.

Configurations

Board settings.png
  1. Title - This is your roadmap board title. Typically, this will be name of your product. For example - Automated Release Notes app for Jira

    1. This will appear on the customer-facing portal 

  2. Description - Roadmap porta description in brief. This is visible to end users.

  3. Path - This will generate your customer-facing portal link. e.g. https://amoeboids.roadmapper.app/autoreleasenotes

    1. roadmapper.app - Domain is fixed

    2. amoeboids - This subdomain comes from your Jira’s base URL & cannot be modified

    3. autoreleasenotes - This is the path that you can configure for each roadmap portal configuration

  4. Header background - This setting allows to set a different background for the page header. It can be an image or color as header background.

    1. Header background color - Select the relevant color to set the header background

    2. Header text color - Select the text color for the header

    3. Header background image - Select the image if you do not wish to just apply a header color

  1. Board logo - Branding configurations for the customer-facing portal can be set up here. Easily add logo to the customer facing roadmap portal.

    1. Logo URL - You can set a logo URL to direct users to your product website

    2. Logo tooltip text - Add a tooltip for the logo

  2. Favicon - Upload a favicon for the roadmap portal.

  3. Roadmap access - Possible options Public, Private, Restricted, Off

    1. If switched off, the customer-facing portal link will display an error message.

    2. If private, the roadmap portal can be accessed only after login.

    3. If public, the roadmap portal can be accessed without logging in. But voting, and commenting require the end user to log in.

    4. If restricted, then users only from the configured organizations (JSD organizations) or email domains can log in and interact with the roadmap board.

  4. Votes and comments -

    1. Customer comments - Decide whether customer comments should be enabled, disabled, or posted after moderation.

      1. Allowed - customer can add comments when logged in and they are immediately posted on the roadmap portal for others to see.

      2. Moderate - customer can add comments when logged in but these comments first have to be approved by a moderator to be visible to others. Moderators can also reject the comments and they remain hidden from other’s view.

      3. Disabled - customer won’t be able to add new comments, but will be able to edit/delete their own if pre-existing

    2. Disable/enable customer votes - Decide whether customers should be allowed to vote on the features on roadmap. If disabled, following are the impact areas -

      1. Project admin & Service agents will still be able to add votes

      2. If there are any votes on the portal, they will remain visible

      3. Customers won’t be able to add new votes but will be able to remove their own if pre-existing

    3. Enable vote/unvote on behalf of - This will show/hide the add/remove vote on behalf of link on the roadmap portal. Vote/Unvote on behalf of actions will always be restricted to project admins and agents.

    4. Enable/disable anonymous voting - Decide whether customers should be allowed to vote anonymously.

    5. Decide whether customer comments should be added as internal comments to JSM tickets

  5. Integrations

    1. Google analytics id - Add a Google analytics ID here to track activity on the customer facing roadmap portal. It accepts both the id formats , i.e. new google analytics 4 (GA4) measurement ID (example: G-XXXXXXX) and old UA Tracking ID (example:UA-XXXXX-Y). This is an optional parameter.

  6. Feature request widget

    1. Enable widget - This toggle is to enable or disable the feature request widget. If Enabled, below two options are displayed -

      1. JSM widget - This determines whether the JSM widget will be displayed on the customer-facing portal.

        1. JSM widget data key - If JSM widget is enabled, this identifier is used to create the appropriate widget linked to your service desk project.

      2. Custom form - If you select this option, system allows you to configure a request type. When end users click on Feature reqeuest widget, they will get form for the selected request type to submit their request.

  7. Show additional link in the header - Enable additional links to be displayed on customer-facing porta. If switched on, a & b below would be considered. Otherwise, ignored.

    1. Link text - Additional link's text to be displayed

      1. For example, in the image above we have provided link to the app’s documentation & called the text ‘Help docs’

    2. Link URL - URL of the relevant link

      1. Link text, defined above will point to this URL

  8. Board Users - This is the list of Jira users who will get notified when there is any vote/comment-related activity on cards listed in the customer-facing roadmap portal. These are also the moderators for the given roadmap board

  9. Email notifications - Email notifications will be sent via this email. Add SMTP settings to connect your email. Read .

Tabs & columns

Above set up only dictates, how the roadmap portal looks like. But what content is displayed in that roadmap portal is dependent on following set up.

  1. Tabs - In this section you define all tabs that are displayed on the customer-facing portal.

    1. There is no restriction on number of tabs, you can add as many as needed. But we recommend not going beyond 3 to keep the roadmap engaging.

  2. Tab name - Name of the tab. This will be visible on the customer-facing portal.

  3. Tab layout - You can choose either the list view as the layout or the kanban view as the layout for each tab. 

  4. Add column - Click on this to add new column. You can create as many columns as you need. But again, don’t go beyond 3 or maximum 4.

  5. Column title - Name of the column, as displayed on the customer-facing portal. For example - Planned features, Features under development, Shipped, etc 

  6. JQL - Add a JQL that will display relevant issue cards in each column. e.g.

Note that 'Project = <project> AND' is automatically appended to each of the JQL queries. So every board will always display issues within the given service project.

Field mappings

Roadmap portal allows advanced configurations so that custom fields from Jira issues are displayed in the customer-facing roadmap portal.

These locations are the different data points that are directly pulled in from Jira issues. On the configuration screen, one can change the default mapping and instead set up custom fields to get this information from. To maintain the aesthetics of the page, there would be restrictions on what kind of custom field one can choose against each of those available locations. These restrictions are detailed in the ‘Comments’ column.

Once done with all this setup, click Save and the board is created!

Using JSD widget

  • To add JSD widget on the roadmap portal, you will need the JSD code snippet. Which will be available after some initial setup in project settings >> widget. Read more details here.

  • Once the widget settings are saved successfully, code snippet will be available on the widget page.

  • <script data-jsd-embedded data-key="f355a29a-4535-4259-b6bc-abcdef12345" data-base-url="https://jsd-widget.atlassian.com" src="https://jsd-widget.atlassian.com/assets/embed.js"> </script>
  • Copy the data-key value from this snippet & save it under JSD widget data key.

  • Now depending on the display settings you have done on widget page in the project setting, customers can see a JSD widget at the bottom right corner of the portal link.

Editing the roadmap board

  • As a Jira Service Desk project administrator, navigate to a JSD project.

  • In the project menu, click on the Roadmap portal in the left-hand navigation. 

  • Click on the Actions menu for the board that you want to edit.

  • From the dropdown on the Actions menu, click on Basic settings if you want to edit the basic settings of the board. If you wish you update the advanced settings, then click on Advanced settings in the dropdown.

  • Board configurations will be available in edit mode.

Deleting the roadmap board

  • As a Jira Service Desk project administrator, navigate to a JSD project.

  • In the project menu, click on the Roadmap portal in the left-hand navigation. 

  • Click on the Actions menu for the board you want to delete.

  • From the Actions dropdown, click on Delete board option.

  • After confirmation, the corresponding board will be deleted.