Theoretically, you could use Post-its to manage your roadmap if you had a big enough board. Instead, you use software tools to make roadmaps easy, save time, and report on-demand progress. You don’t expect those tools to become projects of their own with their own headaches, management cycles, and demands on your time and effort. You certainly don’t expect those tools to slow you down or, sometimes, bring you to a grinding halt.

Plane was designed and built from the ground up to solve first-hand problems we experienced with such project management products. Plane works and lets you work in a way that’s best suited to your needs, goals and workflow - it does the same for our team!

Amongst many other use cases, Plane makes issue tracking simple, intuitive, and fast. From bug tracking to feature requests and beyond, Issues help us organize, timebox, and report on our roadmaps for our two target audience groups—users of our Free plans and customers on our paid plans.

Building the Plane roadmap

For this blog, Plane’s Product Management and Engineering teams are working hand-in-hand on a project called Web app—our primary destination for hundreds of thousands of users. Everything in and at Plane begins with Issues.

• A bug is reported? We create an issue.
• New feature request? Yep, we add an issue.
• Got a v2 of a feature planned and documented? We add an issue and then sub-issues to break it down.
• Code refactor? “Serve me a platter of issues, please.”

Add an issue from anywhere

Issues are the building blocks of Plane and our team adds them from any screen.

1. Right after starting the Web App project, when our Product Manager first lands on the Issues tab on the left, he creates his first issue, ‘Review code base for refactoring.’

2. He then adds two other colleagues via a simple invite flow—one from Design who adds his own issues using the New issue button on the Kanban board. and… 3. …another member from Solutions who adds issues from the Cycles page.

4. The Designer, in turn, adds an engineer who’s focused on our self-hosted deployments to the project and assigns one issue to him.

Nikhil, the assigned engineer, wonders if the issue doesn’t belong in a Module that could span multiple cycles. He adds that issue to a new module he creates and adds more issues from Module details.

5. Another engineer who works closely with Nikhil likes the New issue button on the left nav—he coded it up a while ago, so that’s his go-to method for adding issues. As a matter of fact, most of our team likes it a great deal too!

6. Meanwhile, our PM is now done building most of his issues and thus invites his Engineering counterpart to the project so they can brainstorm the current roadmap. The Principal Engineer, Sriram, is a keyboard-first guy and loves Command + K to add issues of his own.

7. Plane is in its early stages, so the team added to this project thus far needs to add a ton of repeat work. Make a copy comes in handy to duplicate issues that the team can edit immediately or later.

8. Sriram and his team of coders often add issues in the context of the project, so they like the Quick add feature available at the bottom of all layouts (except the Calendar).

Accessible issue properties

The two primary methods of creating issues in Plane come with their speedy delights.

• The primary set of properties available in the Create issue modal lets our PM quickly set dates or assign them to members in other departments, especially as they too add sub-issues and related issues like Performance refactoring for Kanban drag-and-drop or Refactoring search for PQL.
  

• For our principal engineer and his team of speedy coders, the Quick-add feature also lets them set basic props like Assignee, Label and Cycle where relevant.
  

Clear and efficient allocation of work

Assigning an issue to one or several team members is straightforward in Plane—nifty when features like Toast alerts require both PM and Design for audience research and UX + UI work respectively.

Labels for types

Remember how a roadmap has several types of issues? At Plane, we use labels like UX, UI, Migrations, Community, Chore, Bugs, and more to categorize and, later, filter our views.

Solutions that prioritize work by groups of most impactful features, love labels to push work to the backburner and bring others to the foreground.

Drafting our issues

We are a fast-paced team working to organize the chaos of our stage every day. Impromptu meetings, sleep-over-it decisions, and incessant Slack pings break our cadence all the time. Drafts are super-handy for situations when we can’t just add an issue yet but would like to record our idea anyway.

Half-written issues are automatically saved in Drafts for everyone to see and for another member to complete if they have context.

Breaking issues down into trackable chunks

We sometimes treat issues like large pieces of work that need to be broken down into more logical and actionable steps.

Enter Sub-issues- Plane’s nifty child-issues feature that lets us associate issues with a parent or add child issues to a parent as we are creating them. Like Issues, Sub-issues too can be assigned to multiple members and have the full spate of properties Plane comes with.

More issue props

Plane's issue properties promote a culture inclined towards progress and accountability. For us, they ensure,

• Blameless progress
  The team comes together in weekly cycle meetings and identifies blockers to issues and then creates issues for those blockers or picks from a list of existing issues for the Blocking and Blocked by properties. This fosters cross-functional team collaboration, brings everyone to the same page, and saves unnecessary back-and-forths in cycle meetings.
  

• The tree of dependencies
  In the real world, not all dependencies fit parent-child or blocking-blocked relationships
  The Related to property is used to map out relations and soft dependency, which come in handy when you’re building a mindmap of the project.
  Let us understand this with an example. When we set out to do our first refactoring phase, making changes to our code base, in turn, broke some other things that were reported during our testing stage. It took us a while to figure out why this was happening and once we did, we started relating issues. In the long run, it helped us avoid recurring fixes, and make new mistakes. 😄
  

Moving work to the right, right

We trust your team already has their best practices for maximising efficiency and progress. Plane offers tons of flexibility to fit right into that playbook.

Customizable states and familiar state groups

Another humble learning we have had is how the real world works cross-functionally. Plane's States and State groups offer the flexibility cross-functional teams demand of a project management tool.

For our web application project, product, design, engineering, and quality assurance team work together to get even a minor bug fix onto production. Each team in the same project can custom states that they can pick from for their layouts and views.

Layouts for all

Speaking of layouts, our team members have their own quirks and ways of working. Five layouts, available out of the box in Plane, are plenty to accommodate each member’s visualization preferences.

1. The Kanban

Dilip, product supreme, finds it more convenient to easily drag-and-drop of issues from one lane to another instead of changing states per issue. So he prefers the Kanban layout to see and move issues between stages.

Gaurav manages priorities + task assignments to his team. It is important for him to see if, for instance, Nikhil has taken more work than he can chew or if he should offer help with prioritization. With Sub-groups, Gaurav unlocks swimlanes in three clicks for a two-dimensional view of the roadmap and see allocation by member.

2. The Calendar

Akhil, one of our product designers, works on user research and he loves the Calendar layout which shows when his issues are due and prioritizes them by the highest contributors to his milestones.

3. The Gantt

On Fridays, Sainath, one of our frontend engineers, often switches to the Gantt layout to see how his and Nikhil’s tasks are laid out on the timeline and if there are overlaps between Blocking and **Blocked** **by** issues—flags for a team-wide conversation and adjustments for the following Monday.

4. The List

Sriram treats sub-issues the same as issues. He likes to have an itemized view of his team’s tasks and their current statuses and the List layout helps him view just that.

5. The Spreadsheet

The spreadsheet columnar layout is a great way to sort and view issues based on their issues properties. Gaurav, who is the time and task keeper for our team loves this layout.

Each of these layouts have a Peek-over view, particularly useful during team meetings when only a brief about an issue is required.

Granular customization

Five layouts are great, but what you see on them is a function of the question you want answers to. Sometimes, you may want details. At others, you may want to zoom out. Customizations in Plane are built ground-up to let you do that and more without jumping through hoops.

Sort, Filters, and Display Options

• Gaurav, as we saw, sorts all day long, sometimes by due dates and at others, by labels. Dilip, when he’s on the Kanban, uses a manual ordering scheme to get his exact order.

• Sainath and Nikhil, use filters, especially Assignee and Label, to hold their meetings about allocation between In progress, In code reviews and QA per member. To Sriram, it is decisive info for when and how much he should pitch in to help his two other colleagues.
  

• Akhil often adjusts his Display Options to see or hide details like Attachment count and Link. This helps him quickly find issues with screenshots or a Figma link in issue properties and details.
  

“Views. Lots of views.”

• To focus his recurring meetings with Nikhil and Sainath on work allocation, Sriram has saved his filters and display options to a view he calls God’s Eye. This is his most-used view, so he’s starred it to make it easily accessible from the Views screen.
  

• Gaurav likes to be up-to-date with all issues so he can stay a step ahead—important diligence when you are a small team with tough deadlines. Thus, he has created his own view for every team member at Plane, that easily lets him access everyone’s issues by links and files attached. Dilip taps into the same view— all Views are shared across the project—to see who is working on what and if he can offer any help, even tag one of his teammates with an @mention in some comments.
  

• Our founder, Vamsi, is also a part of our workspace but doesn’t get too involved with day-to-day hustles. Instead, he uses the All Issues view to get an overview. This view also reflects issues from his personal projects.
  

• 
  Vamsi has created multiple custom views like ‘Subscribed’ or ‘Started’ in All Issues to give him insights that help him alert Dilip and Sriram to misses and upcoming roadmap items.
  

• The team uses Created to see their tasks and often filters them by the state To do and In progress to get their worksheets for the day.
  

Cross-functional collaboration

Plane is for all work modalities, be it at work, fully remote, or hybrid. Plane works in a hybrid model with people chiming into the office once in a while.

Comments in issues and @mentions in comments

The entire team has a document-first culture and while a lot of the discussion happens on Slack and over Huddles, Plane’s Comments are their source of truth for all.

Dilip, who uses Gaurav’s board, often uses the @mention feature to tag Gaurav, Akhil, and other teammates in a comment. He also uses that plenty with Sainath and Nikhil to get them looking at an idea for an improvement or to create an issue for something more involved.

Change trail

Sriram, who calls code merges and pull requests, has led his team members by the adage, “If you are changing something, write it down.” He often looks at the changing trail of an issue to see who made an essential or a breaking change, which he calls out in the team’s cycle retrospectives.

Connected to Slack + GitHub

Sriram has connected Plane’s workspace to a Slack channel that alerts the whole team of any change in an issue’s title, description, or properties. It also lets them create an issue from Slack with a / command—great for quickly creating an issue from a team Huddle.

For our team, Sriram also has a bi-directional sync with our GitHub repo, so Plane’s security consultants, with whom Sriram often works, can see the latest for an issue and weigh in on system design decisions.

An Inbox for suggestions

Dilip and Sriram have a Red Team of Guests and Viewers—marketers, other product managers, and a couple of engineers from other teams—to critique their roadmap and offer helpful recommendations. Sriram’s turned on Inbox for them, a unique Plane-only feature that lets Guests and Viewers, roles that don’t have write-access to the project, offer ideas, suggestions, bugs, and performance reports in a triaging area before our team decides to turn them into issues.

Publish-ing externally

For getting beta-program feedback, Gaurav duplicated the Plane project as Plane Roadmap, took out issues that users didn’t care about, and shared it publicly with opt-in users via a feature called Publish.

Early users now comment on issues in the project, upvote and downvote them, and even react to issues via emojis. Nikhil privately comments on users’ comments, tagging Dilip and Gaurav for potential board-maker issues that the team should add to the project.

Being in the open-source space, our roadmap is also guided by what our community and early adopters have to say about it.

Plane’s future on Plane

So far, Futurome’s team has used Plane’s Issues and all associated features well enough to consider floating Plane throughout FutureTech while exploring the truest beacons of progress and insights using Cycles, Modules, and Analytics. In two follow-up posts, we will discover how Futurome, and any project of yours, benefits from easy timeboxing, modular features, custom data explorations, and a bonus Notion alternative that makes project documentation a delight.