Initiatives, epics, and features
Roadmap Flow gives every item one of three levels, and lets you nest them. This exists for one reason: a roadmap with a lot of items becomes hard to read, and levels let you fold it down to the parts you are actually discussing.
The three levels
A big bet that spans quarters.
"Expand into the EU."
A meaningful chunk of that bet.
"Local date and currency formats."
One shippable piece.
"Dates in exports follow the OS locale."
An item with no level set counts as an epic. That is deliberate: a roadmap item is already epic-shaped — bigger than a feature, smaller than an initiative — so a roadmap you built before levels existed still means exactly what it always did.
Telling them apart on screen
Every item carries its level as a coloured badge: epics orange, features purple — the Azure DevOps colours, borrowed rather than invented so they are already familiar — and initiatives a deep rose, since ADO has no level above an epic to borrow from. In Stream view the indentation is backed by a rail in the same colours, one per level of nesting, so the shape of the roadmap reads without having to work it out.
The colour is never the only signal. The level is written on the badge wherever there is room, and where there is not — a narrow Timeline column — the word is dropped but the badge still names it to a screen reader and on hover.
The badges only appear on a roadmap that actually uses levels. If you have never set one, nothing changes.
There are no stories, on purpose
Three levels is the whole model, and a fourth will not be added.
A story is a delivery detail. It belongs in the tool your delivery team works in, alongside estimates, sprints and assignees. The moment a roadmap carries stories it stops being a roadmap and becomes a work breakdown — and then nobody can read it in a review, which is the problem levels were added to solve.
If an item feels smaller than a feature, it is probably not a roadmap item at all. Link to it from one instead.
What can sit under what
An item sits under something exactly one level above it:
- a feature can sit under an epic;
- an epic can sit under an initiative;
- an initiative is always top level.
Roadmap Flow only ever offers you legal parents, so you cannot put a feature directly under an initiative by accident.
Nothing is forced. An epic with no initiative above it is perfectly normal, and so is a feature that belongs to no epic. Use nesting where it helps you read the roadmap and leave it alone everywhere else.
Folding the roadmap
In Stream view, a workstream with nesting shows it as an indented tree. Each parent has a control to fold it away, and Collapse all folds everything at once — leaving initiatives and anything with nothing above it, which is the high-level read.
Showing: Initiatives / + Epics / + Features does the same job from the other end: rather than folding parents one at a time, it draws the roadmap only down to the level you pick. It is in every view. On a roadmap that never adopted levels neither control appears — use Collapse streams instead, which folds the workstream rows themselves and works on any roadmap.
A folded item tells you how many things it is hiding, so nothing disappears quietly.
Folding is just a way of looking. It is not saved into your workspace, so it never travels to anyone you share the roadmap with.
Board and Timeline cannot nest — a card belongs to one status column or one time period, not to a branch — so they let you choose which levels to show instead, and each card names the item it sits under. Stream view is the one place that shows the structure itself.
On the Timeline, an item needs dates to be placed on a calendar. If you plan the usual way — direction at the top, dates on the features — an initiative with no dates of its own is spanned across the period its items occupy, so choosing Showing: Initiatives gives you the roadmap at initiative altitude instead of an empty calendar. A span worked out this way is marked with a ~ and a dotted underline, because it is not a date you committed to. Only dates you set yourself reach your CSV, Markdown and JSON exports.
Levels in what you export
Whatever you export carries the structure:
- Markdown nests items under their parents.
- CSV gains Level and Parent columns at the end.
- Slides, PDF and images offer Show down to — Initiatives, Epics, or Everything — so you can hand a stakeholder the one-level view without removing anything from your roadmap.
- The handover brief says what level an item is and what it is part of.
The roadmap transfer file always contains everything, whatever you have chosen to show, so sharing a roadmap never loses detail.
When a level is wrong
If an item ends up somewhere it cannot legally sit — usually after changing a parent's level — the Check tab reports it under Structure and tells you what to fix. The item stays visible on your roadmap the whole time. Roadmap Flow will not hide your work because it disagrees with where you put it.