What is Public Roadmap?

Public roadmap, in depth

Publishing a roadmap trades secrecy for trust. Users who can see “in progress” wait instead of churning; prospects read an active roadmap as a live, responsive product; and votes on published items generate demand data continuously. The cost is accountability — visible items invite questions, so publish deliberately.

A public roadmap does not require exposing your whole backlog. The curated model publishes only requests the team judges credible, keeping experiments and internal work private. This keeps the page persuasive (everything on it is real) and the team unembarrassed (nothing on it is abandoned).

Putting it into practice

Keep it honest and small: a dozen genuinely-tracked items beat fifty stale ones, and an occasional “not planned” builds more trust than silence. TellTide hosts a public roadmap per app — the team publishes selected requests from the private inbox, and users vote, comment, and watch statuses change.

Related terms

• Product roadmap — A product roadmap is a communication artifact showing where the product is headed — what is planned, in progress, and shipped — at whatever fidelity its audience needs.
• Feature voting — Feature voting lets users signal demand by upvoting the feature requests they want, turning scattered anecdotes into ranked, countable preference data..
• Closing the loop — Closing the loop means telling the people who gave feedback what happened to it — the fix shipped, the feature is planned, or the request was declined and why.