Proposal
We took a look at the feedback from our customers and tried a variety of different solutions. Fields have always been an issue with our customers. They have too many fields with similar names or the same fields are added to roadmaps all the time. We needed a quick and easy way to solve some of these issues for our customers. Ultimately, we ended up allowing our customers the ability to create their own templates.

• UX designer tasked with creating flows for this experience
• I worked with a Product Manager, Dev Manager and Senior Developer during the ideation phase. We brought on more developers when the designs were ready.
• Near the end of the project, I hired a new designer and onboarded them to this project. They took over the final testing that was done for this release

Design process

Understand the feedback. We spoke with our customers to see what issues they were having. Our customers were duplicating their roadmaps and replacing the necessary information. We met with customers to better understand what they currently have in the roadmaps they are duplicating as well as what they would like to see in their templates. In addition to having fields added to these roadmaps, they also wanted to be able to set the format options.

Brainstorm. We looked at the list of features that our customers requested. We also tried to put together a list of things that they did not ask for, but would likely want. Once we had a long list of features to add to these templates we narrowed it down to the list of features we could go out with in this initial release.

Ideate! I created several different flows. In addition to creating templates, we also created a flow for how users could easily find these templates when they create a new roadmap. I regularly held design review meetings with the Product Manager and devs involved in this project.

Final concepts
This is a feature that our customers have been requesting for a while now. When we mentioned to our Sales and Customer Support team that this was in development they were excited to get this in our customer's hands.

Once this released I found myself immediately using it. I am frequently creating roadmaps to showcase different features and for my own design planning. Having templates that I can create roadmaps from has saved me a lot of time. One thing that surprised me from this release is that we're now using it as part of our onboarding process. We are currently creating example roadmaps for new employees to use in order to familiarize themselves with the product. I knew this feature was going to have a positive impact on our clients, but I wasn't expecting it to affect my own day-to-day work as well as my colleagues.

Learnings
This feature launched just over a month ago and since it's release we've seen a lot of people using it. There are a few things that we've seen since its release that we've been paying close attention to. Plenty of account admins have created templates, but not a lot of people have created roadmaps from those templates. We are currently working on some designs to draw attention to the new template feature by adding the option to choose a template when the user is creating a new roadmap.

We will also be speaking with customers soon to see what their initial reaction was to this new template feature. We will collect more information from them in order to develop a list of backlog items to be tackled soon.