What is a Now-Next-Later roadmap?
Now-Next-Later is a roadmap format that helps product managers strike a balance of communicating to their stakeholders what they plan to work on over time, while at the same time not making specific feature promises that risk pulling them towards becoming a feature factory.
The format states that the roadmap should be a board with three columns labelled now, next, and later. Apart from that, it is not especially strict, but many interpret it as having specific features in the now column, more general user problems to look at in next, and high-level goals to tackle later in later. With that setup, each feature is linked to a user problem, and each problem is linked to a high-level goal.
Now-Next-Later roadmaps are a part of the Prioritization step of the product management process.
