Statuses, priority, and confidence
A date on a roadmap tells people when. It does not tell them whether to believe it. Three signals on every item do that work: status, priority, and confidence.
Status — where the work is
Status is the current state of an item. Roadmap Flow ships ten defaults:
Agreed, not started.
Being explored or scoped.
Technical preparation before build.
Being built now.
Built, being verified.
Moving, but something threatens it.
Stopped, waiting on something.
Deliberately paused.
Finished.
Shipped to users.
When an item is Blocked, you also pick a blocked reason, so the roadmap says why, not just that.
All statuses — including the defaults — can be renamed, reordered, or deleted from the Config tab. You can also create new ones with a custom color. Deleting a status that items are using prompts you to choose a replacement before anything moves. If you delete a default and regret it, the Restore defaults button in Config adds it back without touching the ones already in your list.
Say what each status means, once
Two people can read "Done" as "the code is merged" and "the customer has it", and a roadmap where that is unsettled misleads quietly. Every status carries a short note — what it means on your roadmap — edited in Config, under the status row. The ten defaults arrive with suggested wording shown in grey; type over it and the note becomes yours, or leave it and it stays the suggestion.
The note then travels to where the decision is made. Opening an item shows what its current status means, and pointing at any other status shows what moving there would do — before you click.
Open Config
Find the status in the Statuses section.
Write what it means
Type in the line under the row. Press Enter to save, Escape to abandon it.
Open any item
The panel under the status chips shows that wording, and what the app does about it.
Point at another status
The panel switches to what would change — what starts, and what stops.
The difference between the two halves matters. The note is yours and the app never acts on it. The list underneath is what the app genuinely does — Blocked lowering your health score, Tech Readiness requiring an outcome — and is generated from the behaviour itself, so it cannot drift from what the app is really doing. A status you created carries no behaviour at all unless you mark it as not on the roadmap yet, and the panel says so rather than leaving you to guess.
A status can mean "not on the roadmap yet"
One status setting changes more than a colour. Marking a status as not on the roadmap yet takes its items off the canvas, out of the health score and out of every export, while leaving them in your workspace. It is how a captured request waits without becoming a commitment. See Unsorted feedback.
Priority — how much it matters
Priority is P0, P1, or P2.
Must happen; the roadmap is about this.
Important; expected but not existential.
Wanted; would be good.
Priority is about importance, not sequence. Time horizons (Now / Next / Later) give a coarse sense of order; for a precise build sequence, see Implementation order, below.
Implementation order — which one gets built first
Priority says how much something matters. It does not say which one to start on — a roadmap can hold three P0s, and someone still has to build one of them first. Implementation order is a plain number for that: 1 is built before 2, 2 before 3, and so on.
It is optional, and most items never get one. Set it right on the card: point at a card and a small # appears in its corner — click it, type a number and press Enter. On a card that already has one, click the #3 to change it. You can also type it in the item's panel, under Priority and Confidence. If another item already holds that number, Roadmap Flow says which one and asks for a different number — two items can never share a rank. Clearing the number removes it entirely; an item with no number simply keeps its usual place.
To put numbered items ahead of everything else on Board, Stream and Timeline, lowest number first, set Rank by: Build order on the canvas — see Canvas. Under the default, Hierarchy, the number orders items within each level. A number never moves a Timeline card off its own dates. A numbered card carries a small #1-style mark so it is clear why it is sitting where it is.
To see every numbered item as one ranked list — and move one up or down a position — open the Items tab and sort by Build order.
Confidence — how sure you are
Confidence says how solid the plan for an item is. It is the signal most roadmaps leave out, and the one stakeholders most need.
High confidence means the item is well understood and likely to land as described. Low confidence means it is real but still soft — scope, timing, or feasibility could still move.
Reading the three together
The signals are most useful in combination. A P0 with low confidence is Roadmap Flow politely asking whether this is strategy or panic with a label. The Check tab flags exactly that pairing, because a top-priority item you are not sure about is the first thing a roadmap review should discuss.