Roadmap

The roadmap is the answer to "what is engineering working on, and why". Three layers — strategic drivers, multi-quarter initiatives, individual projects — each one rolling up into the next, each one tied to the actual tickets in your PMS.

You are not building a roadmap from scratch. You are pointing the existing one at a strategy.

The three layers

Drivers

Drivers are the business reasons projects exist. Revenue, productivity, risk, compliance, KPI, KTLO. Every project carries one or more drivers. Every driver has a measurement type so you can answer "how much engineering capacity is going at compliance work this quarter".

You configure driver types under Roadmap → Drivers. Use the Seed defaults action to start with the standard six categories, then add your own.

Initiatives

Initiatives are the bigger arc — multi-quarter bodies of work with an owner, a target date, a status. They group projects that ladder up to the same outcome. The list view groups by status by default and shows project counts per initiative; opening one drills into its child projects.

Projects

Projects are the unit of allocation and cost. Every project has a status (planning, active, completed, on_hold, cancelled), a lifecycle stage, an owner, and zero-or-more drivers. Projects are linked to teams via allocations and to PMS work items via the integration sync.

See Projects for the full data model.

PMS-backed projects

If you have a PMS integration configured (ADO, Jira, Linear, Asana), the Roadmap → PMS view shows the source side of the picture: epics, features and stories pulled from the integration, ready to be promoted into Flowstate projects or linked to existing ones.

The link is two-way for read purposes. Flowstate stores the externalId of the source ticket; effort tracking pulls actual time off those tickets and rolls it up against the project. If a ticket has no Flowstate project link, it shows up in the orphan ticket review queue.

How the layers tie together

Driver (Compliance)
  └─ Initiative (SOC 2 Type II)
       ├─ Project (Audit logging revamp)
       │    ├─ Team allocation (Platform — 0.4 FTE)
       │    └─ Linked tickets (ADO #1234, #1289, #1301)
       └─ Project (SSO hardening)

Cost rolls up the same chain. The total spend on "Compliance" this quarter is the sum of project costs whose drivers include compliance, prorated by allocation.

TIP

You do not need to model every layer. Start with projects and drivers. Add initiatives once you have more than ten active projects and need a layer of grouping above them.

Editing in scenarios

Everything on the roadmap respects the live/plan split. Adding a project, changing a status, retagging drivers — all of it can happen inside a scenario without touching live data. Compare two scenarios to see the impact on driver coverage and project mix before merging.

Where to go next

• Projects — full project data model.
• Allocations — assigning teams and people to projects.
• Effort tracking — actuals from your PMS.
• Drivers API — managing driver types programmatically.