The roadmap
anyone reads.
Status is a colour. Phase is a position. Draw it on any canvas, and an AI reads and updates it.
- Demand
- Intend
- Commit
- Solution
- Specifications
- Development
- QA
- Done / Release
- Blocked
- Attention
Three roadmaps that disagree
You cannot present a Gantt to leadership.
The portfolio lives across tools that never quite match. Open it in Jira or any Gantt and nobody sees the shape: cryptic tickets, cramped bars, a legend you re-learn every time. You make mistakes, and you certainly cannot put it on screen in a steering committee.
Same portfolio. Dense, cryptic, unreadable in a room, and impossible to present.
Readable at a glance, ready for leadership, and an error you would have missed jumps out.
One Lmapping board holds every level of detail and doubles as the leadership view. A slip jumps out, you present it as-is, and you draw it in a tool you already know.
The notation
Learn the whole system in a minute.
Status is a colour. Phase is a position. Two independent axes, a closed set of statuses, a small grammar of modifiers and arrows. That is the entire language.
Status is the colour
A closed, deliberately-sequenced lifecycle. A colour means the same thing anywhere on the board, so nobody re-learns a legend.
- Demand1Raised, not yet adopted onto the roadmap.
- Intend2Adopted as an intention, being shaped, not committed.
- Commit3Committed to a target period. Committed is not started.
- Solution4Work begins here: the solution is defined. First active phase.
- Specifications5The first release is specified. Handover happens at the end.
- Development6In build. The delivery zone.
- QA7In verification.
- Done / Release8Delivered and released.
Modifiers sit on any card
- AttentionAn orange fill, or a thick red border. The card keeps its status.
- BlockedA solid red fill. The only fully-red status.
And on the board
- Release cartoucheA grey box grouping cards that ship together as one release, tagged at the bottom.
- Kick-start arrowOne arrow from where a project starts to its final card. The chain in between stays hidden.
- Current monthThe live month is called out in bright pink, so the eye lands on now.
Read through the full notation system and its usage rules, the whole language on one page.
The full notation and rulesHow it works
Read a card.
A card carries two signals on two independent axes. Change one, and the other holds. That is what keeps the board unambiguous.
Phase is the name and the column.
Status (colour)
Target month (position)
Solution. Work begins here: the solution is defined. First active phase.
Two signals. Two axes. They never collide.
The life of a card.
One card, from a demand to a shipped release. It commits, then expands: the chain is retro-planned back from the release month. Each phase goes active as now reaches the left edge of its month. The name never changes, only the status and its colour.
Committed is not started. Work begins at Solution. Once detail lands, a slip cascades the chain downstream.
One model, every zoom
One roadmap. Every level of detail.
Collapse a project to a single card for the published board, or expand it into its full milestone chain for the team that runs it. Flip between them here. Same model, same colours, always in sync, never a second roadmap that drifts.
Published view. The Q4 release and the migration sit as single cards, the chain hidden. Readable across the whole portfolio.
Lmapping vs the usual way
The same roadmap, read two ways. Pick what you are trying to do.
Know a card's status instantly, anywhere on the board
Colour means different things per column or tool, so you re-learn the legend
Status is one colour, same meaning everywhere (status is independent of phase)
The wedge
Built for an AI to read. And to run.
Because the notation is real (colour, position, arrows, a legend map), the board is data, not a screenshot. The agents you already use read it, and with the write-skill they update it, in valid notation.
Read by the agents you already use
OpenAI
GLM{
"board": [
{ "card": "Passkey login", "month": "Jul 2026", "status": "QA" },
{ "card": "Public API", "month": "Sep 2026", "status": "Solution" },
{ "card": "Search v2", "month": "Aug 2026", "status": "Development" },
{ "card": "Home widgets", "month": "Sep 2026", "status": "Commit" }
]
}An AI reads it.
The read-skill turns a board into structured data: cards, status, phase, cartouche, arrows. Register for early access and it ships free, with the white paper and a full course (PDF and video) on the notation and how to run it yourself, plus best practices and use cases.
Live today on Miro, already in daily production use. More canvases follow.
Get the read-skill freeAn AI runs it.
The write-skill applies changes back to the board, in valid notation. A community capability: one lifetime licence, no subscription.
Founding price $19.99 for the first 100, then rising in steps of 100.
Join the communityDraw it where you already work
any whiteboardA box, a colour, an arrow. That is the whole tool.
If you can draw a box and an arrow, you can draw a roadmap.
Lmapping is a notation you own, not software you rent. Like C4 or Wardley Maps, for roadmaps.
Any canvas
A whiteboard, a diagram tool, a sticky wall. The notation is the product, not an app.
Seconds, not hours
Move a card, change a colour. No re-planning ceremony, no export.
Zero lock-in
No dependency on Jira, Aha! or any paid platform. Open and free.
For product and program leaders running multi-team, multi-release portfolios.
Tired of roadmaps that mislead, drift apart across tools, take hours to update, and can't be read by their AI.
Lmapping is an open roadmap notation and delivery method that encodes status, phase, dependencies and governance into one board a human and a machine read the same way.
It is radically simple to draw. Any tool that can place a coloured box and an arrow does it (Miro, or any basic drawing canvas), with nothing complex to learn and changes made in seconds, not hours. And it carries zero lock-in to Jira, Aha! or any paid platform.
Unlike Gantt charts, Kanban tools and roadmap SaaS, which carry state but not a rigorous, machine-readable notation and tie you to their software, Lmapping is at its core a simple, modular drawing that expands as you grow and can be managed by you or by an AI.
The roadmap itself becomes the single, unambiguous, AI-ready source of truth.
- Demand
- Intend
- Commit
- Solution
- Specifications
- Development
- QA
- Done / Release
Do not ship a tool. Be the notation.
Get early access.
Leave your details for the spec, the reference tooling, and an invite when the community opens.