Roadmaps: Open windows to our work

In any game, understanding the rules, objectives, resources, and roles is essential for success. Without clear information, playing becomes impossible to play effectively.

The same concept applies to open-source products. When everyone is on the same page, aware of the product's direction, and knows how to contribute, we can all work toward a common goal.

There are plenty of resources to ensure information flows. The tool that outlines strategic plans, sets goals, and defines the direction of a project over a specific time frame is known as a roadmap.?

By sharing a roadmap with the community, we ensure that potential players or contributors can see how they can help move the project forward and work towards achieving that shared objective.?

For open-source projects, like Penpot, product roadmaps are particularly valuable as they help contributors and stakeholders see how their efforts fit into the larger picture. This transparency helps build a strong, engaged community that shares the project's vision and purpose.

Many organizations take the initiative to update and tailor their roadmaps for their different stakeholders: their team, users, and community, among others.

At Penpot, we consistently share our goals and use Taiga to make our work accessible, allowing everyone to follow our progress and priorities. On our Taiga project, you can track Penpot's progress through backlogs, issues, and sprints.

The start of the year is a common time to share your resolutions, and it's also a great opportunity to reveal the roadmap for the year ahead. What makes this useful?

Reasons to share a product roadmap?

By keeping things open, the project becomes stronger and more connected. Additional benefits of offering a clear view of our work are:

1. Building trust?

Transparency builds trust by giving team members, contributors, and users a sense of alignment and ownership. Early updates on upcoming developments also allow users to plan their strategies.

2. Engagement?

Roadmaps encourage active participation and motivate contributors by providing clarity on common goals. Publishing the roadmap guides contributors to areas where their skills are most needed, allowing them to make a meaningful impact.?

Shared plans and roadmaps are a great practice for open-source products: they build trust, increase engagement, save time, invite feedback, and promote long-term sustainability.

For instance, knowing if a specific feature is already in progress can help someone decide to contribute as a beta tester. This stage is critical, especially for a product like Penpot. During beta testing, we invite the community to try out a new feature before its official launch, so they can give feedback and creative input that helps shape the tool.

Roadmaps also create excitement for what's ahead, keeping everyone excited for new features. Who doesn’t love looking forward to what's next?

3. Saving time

Clearly outlining what’s coming cuts down on repetitive customer service inquiries about future developments, streamlining communication.

4. Feedback and long-term sustainability

Sharing our plans early on helps us gather feedback, tackle challenges, and adapt to changes in open source, technology, and community needs.

Check out this article by Contribute CNCF for a full range of reasons why having a well-defined roadmap is essential for open-source projects.

How to prioritize?

Building a roadmap involves deciding what to tackle first and how to rank tasks. Prioritizing effectively requires focused effort.?

To set our priorities, we must first consider our goals, technical challenges, community feedback, market trends, and available resources.?

At Penpot we balance community input with our two main objectives: bridging the gap between designers and developers and ensuring the platform’s long-term viability. As Andrés González (Andy), product owner at Penpot, discusses in this community post, he identifies four key focus areas for prioritization:

1. Feature parity: Closing the gap with leading design tools.

?2. Differentiation: Establishing Penpot as an innovative solution for designers and developers.

3. Quality of life: Prioritizing improvements to overall product quality.?

4. Community growth: We recognize that we are not just building a product, but also nurturing a community.

This is not a Roadmap!

We regularly share our long-term plans with the community through different channels, including live meetings, online sessions, and articles in our community space.

In this case, Andy opted to describe it not as a Roadmap, but as an "open window into what we’re working on now, what’s coming up”.

What Penpot is building

• A new render engine that will improve Penpot’s overall performance and stability. Take a look at its progress.
• Native design tokens, built along with Tokens Studio, the creators of the most popular design tokens plugin in the world. Coming soon!
• Enhancements to improve user experience that we like to call "design deal breakers”.?

What’s coming up

• Component variations, outlined in this epic.
• An upcoming business model that can bring some innovation to open-source friendly business models. Check out Pablo’s detailed article and video inside.

• AI R&D (Artificial Intelligence Research and Development). We now have a much clearer understanding and a well-defined plan of action. Staying more aligned with traditional machine learning techniques will help us focus not on generating outputs, something we’re not very interested in, but on assisting in design processes, Andy explained.

Open-source projects and new products often face uncertainty, as factors like new competitors or emerging technologies can shift the direction of the project.

Although it can be tough to predict future needs, having a roadmap aids the community, users and stakeholders to understand how their efforts contribute to the larger vision. This transparency fosters a connected, motivated community aligned with the project's goals.