Roadmaps

GitHub Roadmaps are a feature that helps you visualize and organize plans for your projects, allowing you to create a high-level view of milestones and goals, and collaborate on planning and tracking progress with team members.

What a roadmap is for

A roadmap answers "what are we working towards, and in what order" at a level above individual issues. It is a communication tool before it is a planning one: the failure mode is a roadmap nobody reads, which usually happens when it lists everything rather than the next few things.

Issues versus Projects

Roadmaps replaced the old Projects columns. The distinction that matters now:

• Issues are individual pieces of work. They are in the repository, they can be commented on and closed, and they persist.
• Projects are views over issues. A board, a table, a roadmap — several views of the same issues, not copies of them.

So the work is always an issue, and a project is how you arrange it. Closing an issue updates every view it appears in, which is why duplicating tasks into a project instead of referencing issues is the thing to avoid.

Setting one up

Create a project from the Projects tab, then add issues to it from the sidebar while working on them. A useful first view is a table with Status, Priority and Iteration as fields, filtered to the current iteration.

The iteration habit

Time-boxed iterations are what stop a board becoming a wishlist.

# .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/feature_request.md
Iteration: 2026-Q4

An iteration is a date range in a project field. Assign issues to one, and the roadmap view groups by it. At the end, close or carry over deliberately — an unclosed iteration is how a board quietly fills with stale work.

Keeping it honest

• One project per team, not one per person.
• Carry unfinished work over explicitly rather than leaving it in the past iteration.
• Close issues when they are done. A board where 60% of items are open is reporting on nothing.

See Kanban Boards for the table-driven alternative, and GitHub Projects for the full feature.

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