Roadmap Chapter

Roadmaps decay because updating them is friction: the truth changes in minutes, but the diagram lives in a slide nobody wants to reflow. Making the source plain text removes the friction — an update is one line, the layout is the tool's problem, and the diagram is always regenerable. Text also diffs: paste versions into git or a doc and you can see exactly what moved between planning cycles, which slides will never tell you.

The default now/next/later form (over date-based Gantt) is deliberate: dates on a roadmap read as commitments and get negotiated; horizons communicate sequence and intent while staying honest about uncertainty. See Janna Bastow on inventing now/next/later, and her case against timeline roadmaps. If your organisation plans in calendar time anyway, generate month or quarter columns (horizons: quarterly from Q3 2026 x4).

The snapshot/compare feature exists because the most useful roadmap artefact isn't the roadmap — it's what changed since last time. Snapshot before each planning cycle; the comparison renders new, moved, and dropped items as an exportable slide.

Exports leave at 16:9, because a roadmap's destination is almost always a deck: pick a structure with style: (columns, a hero for the current horizon, a formal register, or the chart itself), and colour still comes from palette:/accent: — a style owns structure, never colour. The headline under the title is the one thing the tool won't write for you. It could: the model knows which horizon is overloaded and what's at risk. But a headline is a claim you're making to a room, and a tool that drafts it for you has put words in your mouth — so headline: stays blank until you write it, and the deck simply omits it if you don't. The tool still tells you when Now is overloaded; it just says it in the editor, where an argument belongs, rather than on your slide.

The four Chapter layouts share typography and colour settings. Horizons arranges work by sequence; Spotlight gives one horizon a dominant reading surface; Register is an accountable review table; Time grid shows occupancy and overlap. Each is editable in place. On a phone each view keeps its purpose: Time grid stacks time, Horizons moves one horizon at a time, Spotlight becomes a vertical lens, and Register becomes a review log.

A span (x3) means an item runs for that many columns straight — full occupancy, not a landing-date guess. That distinction is deliberate: honest uncertainty about when something lands is what Timeline is for, with its own P50/P90 language; a span here says the opposite, that the work is committed and running for its whole length. Drag its edges to change how long it runs, or its middle to move it without changing the length. A span can also leave an item active in a column it was never written under, so the WIP guardrail now counts everything active in a column, not just what starts there — a crunch two quarters out, invisible before, now warns.