Customers want to know where your product is going. A public roadmap answers that question transparently — it shows what you’re planning, what you’re building right now, and what you’ve recently shipped. This builds trust, reduces “when will you add X?” support tickets, and gives your most engaged users a reason to stick around.

Heedback’s public roadmap connects directly to your feature boards, so items flow naturally from customer request to shipped feature without manual duplication.

Prerequisites

To share a public roadmap, you need:

A Heedback account with a Pro plan (the public roadmap is a Pro feature).
Access to app.heedback.io as an admin in your organization.
At least a few items to populate the roadmap. An empty roadmap undermines trust rather than building it. Have 5–10 items across different stages before you go public.

Step 1: Enable the Public Roadmap

Navigate to Settings → Portal in your Heedback dashboard. Under the Roadmap section, toggle Public Roadmap on.

Once enabled, the roadmap is accessible at yourorg.heedback.io/roadmap and linked from your customer portal navigation. Visitors can see it without logging in — it’s fully public by design.

You can also control whether the roadmap link appears in your portal’s main navigation or only via direct URL. If you want to soft-launch the roadmap to a smaller audience first, hide the nav link and share the direct URL with specific customers for feedback.

Step 2: Configure Your Roadmap Columns

The roadmap displays items in a Kanban-style board with configurable columns. The default setup includes three columns:

Planned — features your team has committed to building but hasn’t started yet.
In Progress — features currently under active development.
Done — features that have shipped recently.

You can customize column names to match your workflow. Some teams prefer “Exploring / Building / Shipped” or “Next Up / In Development / Released.” Choose language that feels natural to your customers — they’re the audience, not your engineering team.

The column order is configurable via drag-and-drop in Settings. Items within each column are sorted by vote count by default, putting the most-requested features at the top.

Step 3: Add Items to the Roadmap

There are two ways to populate your roadmap:

From feature boards (recommended): Open any post on your feature boards and set its status to “Planned,” “In Progress,” or “Done.” Posts with these statuses automatically appear in the corresponding roadmap column. This means your roadmap stays in sync with your feature boards without any extra work.

Manually: In the roadmap settings, you can add standalone items that aren’t linked to board posts. This is useful for strategic initiatives that didn’t originate from customer requests — infrastructure upgrades, platform migrations, or partnership integrations.

For board-linked items, vote counts carry over to the roadmap. Customers can see how many people requested each feature, which adds social proof and reinforces that you listen to feedback.

Step 4: Control What’s Visible

Not everything on your internal roadmap belongs on the public one. Heedback gives you control over visibility at the item level:

Public by default — board posts with roadmap-eligible statuses appear on the public roadmap automatically. This is the simplest approach and works well for most teams.
Manual approval — if you prefer tighter control, enable the “Require approval for roadmap” setting. This adds an explicit “Show on roadmap” toggle to each post, so you decide exactly what customers see.

A few things you might want to keep off the public roadmap:

Competitive features you don’t want to telegraph to rivals.
Internal technical debt or refactoring projects that don’t directly benefit customers.
Experimental items that might be cut — showing then removing items erodes trust.

When in doubt, err on the side of transparency. Customers appreciate seeing even small improvements on the roadmap.

Step 5: Embed the Roadmap on Your Website

Beyond the portal, you can embed your roadmap directly on your marketing site or product documentation. Heedback provides an embed URL that you can place in an iframe:

<iframe
  src="https://yourorg.heedback.io/roadmap/embed"
  width="100%"
  height="600"
  frameborder="0"
></iframe>

The embedded view is responsive and inherits a clean, minimal design that works on most sites. For tighter integration, use the embed with your portal’s custom domain so the URL matches your brand.

Embedding the roadmap on your marketing site is particularly effective for SaaS companies — it signals product velocity and customer-centricity to prospects evaluating your tool.

Tips and Best Practices

Update the roadmap weekly. A stale roadmap is worse than no roadmap. Move items through columns as their status changes. Customers notice when “In Progress” items sit untouched for months.
Celebrate shipped items. When you move something to “Done,” pair it with a changelog entry that explains what shipped and how to use it. This closes the loop publicly and drives adoption of new features.
Keep the “Planned” column realistic. Only add items you’re genuinely committed to building in the near term. A “Planned” column with 30 items spanning two years of work isn’t a plan — it’s a wish list.
Link to the roadmap from support replies. When a customer asks “Are you going to add X?”, link them to the roadmap. It answers their question and introduces them to a channel where they can vote and stay updated.
Use the roadmap in sales conversations. Prospects often ask about your product direction. A public roadmap gives them a concrete, credible answer that doesn’t require a meeting with product leadership.

Feature Boards — where customer ideas originate before flowing into the roadmap.
Changelog — announce shipped features that move through the “Done” column.
Customer Portal — the home for your roadmap, knowledge base, and feature boards.
Embeddable Widget — customers can submit new feature requests that eventually appear on the roadmap.