Now-Next-Later Roadmap

A Now-Next-Later roadmap is a roadmap format that groups work into three time horizons instead of exact dates: what the team is working on now, what comes next, and what it is considering for later. Created by Janna Bastow of ProdPad, it reflects how certainty decreases the further ahead a team plans, and avoids promising dates the team cannot guarantee.

How a Now-Next-Later Roadmap Works

The roadmap has three columns:

• Now: work that is in progress or about to start. Items are well understood, detailed and committed.
• Next: priorities that come after current work. The problem is clear, but solutions and scope are still being shaped.
• Later: bigger problems and opportunities the team expects to address. They stay visible to show direction, without commitment.

Detail and confidence decrease from left to right. As work in Now finishes, items move left from Next, and Later items are refined into Next once the team has enough evidence. Items are usually written as problems to solve or initiatives linked to objectives, not as lists of features, which makes the format a natural fit for an outcome-based roadmap.

Bastow developed the format around 2012, originally labeling the columns Current, Near Term and Future, as a response to timeline roadmaps that kept turning into arguments about dates. ProdPad recommends pairing it with OKRs, so every initiative on the roadmap is tied to an objective and its key results.

Why a Now-Next-Later Roadmap Matters

Timeline roadmaps imply that the team knows what it will deliver in nine months, which is rarely true. Every slipped date then damages trust. The Now-Next-Later format is honest about uncertainty: it commits firmly only to the near term while still showing where the product is heading. As Bastow puts it, time horizons let a team move forward with a broad plan while only committing to what lies directly ahead.

The format also changes stakeholder conversations. Instead of negotiating when a feature will ship, people discuss which problems matter most and in what order. Reprioritizing is cheap: moving an item between columns does not break a chain of dates.

Its limitation is that some commitments genuinely have dates, such as a contractual obligation, a regulatory deadline or a launch event. Teams handle these by marking the few hard deadlines explicitly rather than putting the whole roadmap on a timeline. How such a roadmap evolves as new evidence arrives is explored in evidence-based product roadmapping.

Now-Next-Later Roadmap Example

A team building a personal-finance app keeps this roadmap:

• Now: make bank connections more reliable, because failed syncs are the top reason for support tickets.
• Next: help users stick to a monthly budget, starting with alerts when spending runs ahead of plan.
• Later: support shared household finances for couples and families.

When interviews show that shared finances come up in almost every conversation with paying users, the team moves that item to Next and pushes budgeting alerts back. No delivery dates had to be renegotiated.

Now-Next-Later vs. Timeline Roadmap

Both are formats of a product roadmap; the choice depends on how predictable the work really is.