Start With Your Team

Before we get into features, resource allocation, and effort, we need to identify who is going to work on this product. This probably means a mix of Engineers, Designers, and Product Managers.

In the table above, I have 3 columns: People , Role , and Skills . The People column is a People column type in Coda allowing you to select all the teammates in your domain. Where does the Role select list that contains the options Engineer, Designer, and Product Manager come from? I created a separate “Team” table that just has those 3 options as the display column:

You’ll notice that the People column in the “Team” table contains all the team members from my “People” table correctly assigned to their respective roles. The formula in the People column of the “Team” is:

=Lookup(People, Role, thisRow).People

This formula does a lookup to the “People” table, finds the rows where the Role in the “People” table matches the current row in the “Team” table, and just brings back the People column. It’s kind of like doing a VLOOKUP in Excel except you can return multiple values from your Lookup table instead just one value. The Skills column in the “People” table let’s you select what skills your teammates are good at, and the values for this select list are determined by a small one-column table called “Skills”:

Now that we have the basic tables for our team (“Team”, “People,” and “Skills”), it’s time to build out two more tables: Features and Resource Allocation. Then we’ll have the tables we need to create our own product roadmap application that is flexible and customizable to our team and product launch.

Features In Your Product Plan

This is the master list of where your team can store all the specific product features you want to build and launch. Some of the columns we are going to add include:

Feature

Description

Lead (person)

Start Date

End Date

Working Days

Effort

Effort Per Day

Assignees

You don’t need to have all these columns in your final product plan app, but you may find some of these columns useful depending on how you want to track resource allocation for your team. Here is what our final Features table looks like: