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 has nine:
- Planned — agreed, not started.
- Discovery — being explored or scoped.
- Tech Readiness — technical preparation before build.
- Testing — built, being verified.
- At Risk — moving, but something threatens it.
- Blocked — stopped, waiting on something.
- Parked — deliberately paused.
- Done — finished.
- Released — shipped to users.
When an item is Blocked, you also pick a blocked reason, so the roadmap says why, not just that.
Priority — how much it matters
Priority is P0, P1, or P2.
- P0 — must happen; the roadmap is about this.
- P1 — important; expected but not existential.
- P2 — wanted; would be good.
Priority is about importance, not sequence. Use time horizons (Now / Next / Later) to express 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.