Theme-Based Roadmaps: A Lens, Not a Plan

Almost every roadmap I see has some concept of themes in it. Usually colour-coded, frequently in a palette chosen to make it maximally impossible to work out what is going on.

The colours are not the problem. The problem is that most teams treat a theme as a way of arranging the roadmap — a prettier container for the same feature list — when its real value is as a way of interrogating it. Used properly, themes answer a question that very few product organisations can answer honestly: is the money going where the strategy says it should?

A theme-based roadmap groups objectives under a small number of strategic themes — usually the growth levers the business already recognises — so you can see what share of capacity each one is receiving. Themes sit above objectives as a lens for checking allocation against the financial plan. They are not the unit you plan in, and they are not a substitute for outcomes.

This is the core of what RoadmapOne is for. Every objective can be tagged with the theme or themes it serves, allocated to specific squads and sprints, and then summed: this theme has 22% of capacity, that one has 4%, and this one has none at all until the third quarter. Where an objective genuinely serves two themes, the capacity splits 50-50 between them, so the percentages still total 100 and nobody can double-count their way to a flattering picture. That arithmetic is the whole point. Without it, a theme is a label on a slide.

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What a Theme Actually Is

Ask ten sources and you will get four incompatible answers. Some put themes at the very top, above objectives. Some make them a tier of the agile hierarchy, sitting above epics and below nothing in particular. Several use “theme” and “initiative” interchangeably without ever defining either, and a few quietly equate themes with outcomes, which they certainly are not.

Here is the model I would defend.

Themes Sit Above Objectives. Epics and Initiatives Sit Below Them

A theme is a strategic grouping — a growth lever, a market, a customer segment, a business capability. It is not work. Nobody delivers a theme.

An objective is the unit you actually plan with: a problem to solve, framed as an outcome with a measure attached, allocated to a squad for a period of time. Objectives are what consume capacity, and therefore what the allocation maths is built from.

Epics, initiatives and stories sit underneath the objective as delivery detail. They belong in your delivery tooling , not on a board-facing roadmap, and the endless industry argument about whether an initiative contains epics or the reverse is largely irrelevant to roadmap planning.

So the chain runs: theme → objective → key results → delivery detail. The competing models that place a theme below an objective, or that treat a theme as an outcome in its own right, break the one property that makes themes useful: that you can sum capacity by theme and get a picture of the whole business.

That division is straight out of the product operating model : leadership allocates objectives to teams, and empowered teams determine the key results they will pursue. Themes are simply how leadership checks its own allocation decisions are coherent, and they sit alongside the other tagging methodologies you might cut the same roadmap by — Run/Grow/Transform, innovation ambition, product line, or your own “we will win by” pillars.

Themes Are a Lens — But a Live One

If themes are a lens rather than a plan, the obvious conclusion is that “theme-based roadmap” is a slight category error. You do not plan in themes. You plan in objectives, allocated to squads and sprints, and you read the roadmap by theme.

That is exactly right, and it is why so many theme roadmaps decay into feature lists with nicer headings. If the theme is the planning object, there is nothing underneath it with a measure attached, so the work reverts to whatever people were going to build anyway — the failure mode that outcome-based roadmaps were invented to escape.

But do not take “lens” to mean “afterthought”. The lens has to be applied while the roadmap is being argued about, not at the end to make the deck look strategic. As objectives move between quarters and squads, the allocation by theme shifts underneath you, and you need to see that happening in the moment — during the planning session, while the trade-off is still live. A theme view you generate once a quarter for the board pack is a retrospective. A theme view that updates as you drag an objective from Q2 to Q4 is a decision-making tool.

Good Themes Are the Growth Levers the Board Already Recognises

The best test of a theme set is whether your ExCo and board already talk in those terms. If they do, the roadmap suddenly speaks the same language as the plan the business signed up to. If your themes need explaining, they are yours rather than the company’s, and they will not survive contact with a board meeting.

At Trainline, our themes one year were Mobile Apps, Leisure (tablet, desktop and mobile), SME & Corporate, eTicketing, International and Season Tickets. Another year we added Ancillary products. Notice what those are: not product areas invented by the product team, but the levers the business expected to grow through — recognisable instantly to the CEO, the CFO and every non-executive in the room.

At Trayport, at one point we ran three: Stronger (customer love), Wider (more asset classes) and Deeper (from front office into middle and back office). Three words, each naming a direction of travel rather than a place on an org chart.

I also use themes to communicate problems to solve inside the organisation, usually as part of a balanced scorecard . That is the cascade: the scorecard says what matters, the themes name the levers, and the objectives underneath them are the actual problems handed to teams.

How Many Themes?

Six at Trainline, rising to about eight. Three at Trayport. Earlier in a company’s life we ran about ten, and that was far too many.

Ten themes is not a strategy, it is an inventory — everything the business does, relabelled, with no choice expressed. At the other extreme, two or three themes only work when they are genuinely directional (Stronger, Wider, Deeper carry real meaning) rather than vacuous. Three to eight is the usable band, and the closer you are to the top of it, the more carefully you should check that every theme earns its place.

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The Roadmap as a Super-Leading Indicator

This is where the lens stops being an organising device and starts being a governance instrument.

Your roadmap is the earliest possible indicator of whether you will hit your financial goals — far earlier than pipeline, months earlier than revenue. Every other leading indicator tells you how the plan is going. The roadmap tells you whether the plan was ever deliverable in the first place.

It Is Not Just Share of Investment. It Is Phasing

Here is the conversation I find myself having most often. A product line is expected to deliver $800,000 of revenue this year. Look at the theme view and it is not resourced until Q3, with most of the deliverables landing in Q4.

Nobody has done anything wrong, exactly. The allocation for the year might look perfectly reasonable as a percentage. But the phasing means everything has to go right: build completes in Q4, the product takes off immediately, and the revenue arrives inside the financial year. Say that out loud in a planning session and everyone recognises it instantly. Leave it inside a colour-coded chart and nobody notices until the third-quarter reforecast.

The inverse matters too. Are we over-investing in a new customer segment given the realistic return? A theme with 30% of capacity and a modest revenue expectation is just as much a signal as a theme with 4% of capacity and a large one.

Sequencing Can Be the Right Answer

Back-loading is not automatically wrong, and this is where the quality of thought shows. “We are not allocating much to Expand into Sweden in Q2, but it is resourced much more heavily in Q3 and Q4, because we need the in-year revenue drivers running first” is a completely defensible answer. It says the team has understood the dependency between paying this year’s bills and building next year’s business.

What is not defensible is back-loading by accident — discovering in October that the theme you promised the board has been squeezed out by unplanned work every single sprint since April.

If the allocated capacity does not match the expected outcome, you go round the loop again. Either the capacity moves, the expectation moves, or the date moves. Those are the only three levers, and the theme view is what forces the choice into the open. It is the same reconciliation as the one between capacity and the growth plan , just cut by lever rather than in aggregate.

Objectives That Serve Two Themes

Real roadmaps refuse to be tidy. An eTicketing objective may serve SME & Corporate as well. A platform investment may underpin three themes at once, which is even more common when you are running several products against one capacity pool .

Forcing a single parent produces false precision, and letting an objective count fully against two themes produces percentages that add up to 130%, which is worse. The pragmatic answer is to allow multiple themes and split the capacity evenly — 50-50 across two, and so on. It is approximate, it is transparent, and it keeps the arithmetic honest. Most importantly it is easy to visualise, which matters more than decimal-point accuracy in a conversation whose purpose is to reveal a mismatch of the order of “this theme has almost nothing”.

If you find that most of your objectives carry two or three themes, that is itself a finding: your themes are overlapping, and you probably need fewer of them.

What Goes Next to Each Theme

The diagnostic is simpler than people expect. For each theme: the share of capacity it is getting, quarter by quarter as well as for the year, and the expected contribution it is supposed to make — revenue, margin, retention, or plain strategic importance.

Then you look for the mismatches. A theme carrying a large number with little capacity. A theme absorbing a quarter of the engineering organisation in service of a modest return. A theme with nothing allocated at all, which is a decision somebody should have made deliberately rather than discovered later. And the phasing check: is the capacity arriving in time for the outcome to land in the year it is booked in?

Strategic importance deserves its own mention, because not every theme has a revenue number, and there is — rightly — always an element of the HiPPO in these decisions. A CEO who says “I want us in Sweden, and I accept it will not pay back this year” is making a legitimate call. The theme lens does not remove judgement. It just means the judgement is visible and can be argued with.

Internal Themes Are Legitimate

A theme heavy with internal work — replatforming, end-of-lifing a legacy system, paying down the maintenance tax — can be entirely correct. Some years it is the most valuable thing you do.

What you are looking for is balance and, again, quality of thought. A business that consistently allocates nothing to internal renewal is borrowing from its future. A business where the internal theme quietly grows every year without anyone deciding that it should has lost control of its own portfolio .

Themes Are How Strategy Cascades — Including the Awkward Part

Themes are usually how strategy gets communicated down and across an organisation. Which produces a problem nobody writes about.

You will have a business team — a sales unit, a market, a function — whose entire year is organised around a theme that is getting essentially nothing on the roadmap. That can be the right call for the business as a whole. Optimising the whole system frequently means starving a part of it, and a roadmap that gives every team a little bit of everything is usually a roadmap that achieves nothing in particular, for the same reason that too much work in progress finishes nothing.

But it is a grown-up conversation, and the theme view makes it unavoidable rather than easier. Those teams can end up feeling like second-class citizens, and if you let that fester you will pay for it in goodwill you need later. Handle it directly: say what they are not getting, say why, say what would have to change for that to be different, and say when it will next be revisited. What you must not do is let them discover it from a chart.

How Theme Roadmaps Fail

Four failure modes, in roughly the order I encounter them.

Decoration. The theme exists only as a colour on a chart. Nobody ever sums it, so no allocation question is ever asked and the theme changes nothing about any decision. This is by far the most common, and it is why the format has a slightly hollow reputation.

Slogan themes. “Improve collaboration”. “Customer delight”. Themes so vague that any piece of work can be filed under them, which means the tagging carries no information. A good theme makes some work obviously not belong to it.

Stale themes. Last year’s levers still on this year’s roadmap, because nobody wanted to argue about the list. If the growth levers have changed and the themes have not, the lens is now showing you a picture of a company that no longer exists.

Theme churn. The opposite failure. A re-org renames everything, and you lose the ability to compare this year’s allocation with last year’s. Themes should change when the strategy changes, not when the org chart does — the year-on-year comparison is one of the most valuable things the lens gives you.

Cadence: Quarterly, and With the ExCo in the Room

The theme review belongs in the quarterly planning cycle, with the executive team present. Not because the numbers change quarterly — the strategy should be steadier than that — but because the allocation drifts continuously as priorities move , work overruns and new demands arrive.

The purpose of the quarterly session is alignment before commitment: everybody looks at the same allocation picture, argues about it while it is still changeable, and leaves agreeing what the business is actually funding. Done well, it makes the board conversation almost boring, which is exactly what you want.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a product theme?

A product theme is a strategic grouping that sits above your objectives — typically a growth lever, market, customer segment or capability the business already recognises. Themes are not work and nobody delivers them. Their purpose is to let you tag objectives and sum capacity, so you can see what share of engineering investment each strategic priority is actually receiving.

What is a good example of a theme?

Trainline ran six: Mobile Apps, Leisure, SME & Corporate, eTicketing, International and Season Tickets — the levers the business expected to grow through. Trayport ran three directional ones: Stronger (customer love), Wider (more asset classes) and Deeper (front office into middle and back office). Both sets were instantly recognisable to the board, which is the real test.

What are epic themes?

In agile tooling, “theme” is often used for a grouping above epics, which causes confusion. For roadmap planning the useful hierarchy is theme → objective → key results → epics and stories. Epics are delivery detail owned by the squad; themes are a leadership lens for checking allocation. If you are grouping epics, you are organising work, not testing strategy.

How many themes should a product roadmap have?

Three to eight. Below three, themes are usually too broad to discriminate between pieces of work unless they are genuinely directional. Above eight, you have an inventory of everything the business does rather than an expression of choice. Ten is a common early-stage mistake. If most objectives carry two or three themes, your themes overlap and you need fewer.

What is the difference between themes and OKRs?

They answer different questions. An objective, with its key results, is the planning unit: a problem to solve, with a measure, owned by a squad. A theme is a tag above the objective that lets you group and sum. OKRs tell you whether a team succeeded; themes tell leadership whether the portfolio of objectives matches the financial plan.

Should a theme-based roadmap have dates?

It needs phasing, which is not the same as delivery dates. You should be able to see capacity by theme per quarter, because a theme that is fully funded for the year but not resourced until Q3 will not deliver revenue booked in that year. Commit to outcomes and sequencing at the theme level; leave precise dates to delivery planning.

Conclusion

Themes will not fix a roadmap. They are not a planning method, they do not decide anything on their own, and colour-coding them achieves precisely nothing.

What they do — when they map to the growth levers the business already believes in, when objectives are tagged against them, and when somebody actually adds up the capacity — is turn the roadmap into the earliest honest signal you have about whether this year’s plan is going to happen. That signal is available in February, while you can still do something about it, rather than in October when you cannot.

Pick three to eight levers your board would recognise. Tag every objective. Sum the capacity by quarter, not just by year. Then look at the gaps between what each theme is getting and what it is expected to deliver, and have the argument that picture starts.