Technical roadmaps serve a different audience than product roadmaps. The people reading them (engineering managers, architects, platform leads, and CTOs) want to see system dependencies, migration phases, and risk assessments. They do not need marketing positioning or customer personas. They need to know what is changing in the infrastructure, why, and what breaks if the timeline slips.
These eighteen templates cover the full technical planning surface: architecture decisions, platform migrations, API strategy, DevOps maturity, security hardening, and the unglamorous-but-critical work of managing technical debt. The Technical PM Handbook covers how to think about technical product management. These templates are the planning artifacts. All are free PowerPoint downloads compatible with Google Slides.
Architecture and Platform
These templates plan large-scale architectural decisions and platform-level work that spans multiple teams and quarters.
Technical Architecture Roadmap
The technical architecture roadmap plans the evolution of your system architecture over time. It maps current state to target state with intermediate milestones, showing which components change, which stay, and which are deprecated. Use this when the team needs to align on a multi-quarter architecture change, like moving from a monolith to services or adopting a new data layer.
Platform Roadmap
The platform roadmap plans the capabilities that internal platform teams provide to product teams. It covers infrastructure services, developer tools, shared libraries, and self-service capabilities. For organizations with a dedicated platform team, this template communicates what product teams can expect and when, reducing the ad-hoc requests that derail platform work.
Infrastructure Roadmap
The infrastructure roadmap plans compute, storage, networking, and observability changes. It covers capacity planning, cloud provider decisions, cost optimization initiatives, and reliability improvements. This template works for both cloud-native and hybrid environments and includes a cost tracking section to align infrastructure investment with business growth.
Technical Debt Roadmap
Technical debt is the work you chose not to do now that makes future work harder. This roadmap inventories debt items, scores them by business impact and remediation effort, and plans the paydown sequence. The template forces you to quantify the cost of inaction: how much engineering velocity is lost per quarter if this debt is not addressed. That is the argument that gets leadership to approve debt reduction work.
Migration and Modernization
Migrations are some of the riskiest engineering work because they change running systems. These templates plan them carefully.
Platform Migration Roadmap
The platform migration roadmap plans the move from one platform to another: changing cloud providers, moving from self-hosted to SaaS, or migrating from a legacy platform to a modern stack. It breaks the migration into phases with rollback plans at each stage. Each phase defines what migrates, what stays, and how the two systems coexist during the transition. The template includes a risk register specific to migration: data loss, downtime, feature parity gaps, and user impact.
Tech Stack Migration Roadmap
The tech stack migration roadmap plans language, framework, or toolchain changes: migrating from one frontend framework to another, upgrading database engines, or replacing build systems. Unlike platform migration, tech stack changes often happen gradually. The template supports a strangler-fig approach where new code uses the new stack while old code is migrated incrementally.
Migration Roadmap
A general-purpose migration template for any large-scale data or system migration. It covers pre-migration assessment, data mapping, migration execution, validation, and cutover planning. Use this when the migration does not fit the platform or tech stack patterns: database migrations, service consolidations, or vendor transitions.
API and Developer Experience
APIs are products for developers. These templates plan them with the same rigor as user-facing features.
API Roadmap
The API roadmap plans new endpoints, capability expansions, and developer experience improvements. It organizes work by API domain (payments, users, content, etc.) with versioning strategy and deprecation timelines. For API-first companies, this is the product roadmap. It communicates to external developers what is coming and when.
API Versioning Roadmap
Managing multiple API versions simultaneously is a planning challenge that standard roadmaps ignore. This template tracks active versions, planned deprecations, migration support timelines, and the communication plan for each version transition. It ensures no API version is deprecated without giving consumers adequate notice and migration tooling.
SDK Roadmap
The SDK roadmap plans client libraries across multiple platforms (JavaScript, Python, iOS, Android, etc.) with feature parity tracking and release coordination. For products that distribute SDKs, keeping them in sync is a chronic pain point. This template makes cross-platform parity visible and plans feature rollouts across SDK languages.
DevOps, Security, and Quality
These templates plan the operational and security work that keeps production systems reliable and safe.
DevOps Roadmap
The DevOps roadmap plans CI/CD pipeline improvements, deployment automation, environment management, and developer productivity tools. It tracks maturity across DevOps capabilities (continuous integration, continuous deployment, infrastructure as code, monitoring, incident management) and plans the progression from manual processes to automated ones.
Security Roadmap
The security roadmap plans the hardening of your application and infrastructure: vulnerability remediation, access control improvements, encryption upgrades, compliance certifications, and security monitoring. It organizes work by security domain and risk level so the highest-impact items get addressed first.
Observability Roadmap
The observability roadmap plans logging, monitoring, tracing, and alerting improvements. It covers the three pillars (metrics, logs, and traces) with maturity targets for each. For teams drowning in alerts that do not lead to action or missing visibility into production issues, this template structures the path from reactive firefighting to proactive observability.
Quality Assurance Roadmap
The QA roadmap plans test automation, coverage expansion, and quality process improvements. It tracks automation coverage by test type (unit, integration, e2e, performance) and plans the investment needed to reach target coverage levels. For teams transitioning from manual QA to automated testing, this template structures the shift.
Testing Strategy Roadmap
The testing strategy roadmap is broader than QA. It plans the overall testing philosophy including test environments, test data management, shift-left practices, and the testing pyramid balance. Use this when the team needs to rethink its testing approach, not just add more tests.
Specialized Technical Work
Technical Spike Roadmap
A technical spike is a time-boxed investigation to reduce uncertainty before committing to a solution. This roadmap organizes multiple spikes with hypotheses, investigation plans, time boxes, and findings. For teams that need to explore before building (evaluating new technologies, prototyping approaches, or benchmarking alternatives), this template keeps spikes focused and accountable.
Technical Documentation Roadmap
Documentation is the technical product nobody wants to plan. This roadmap prioritizes documentation work by audience impact: API reference docs, architecture decision records, runbooks, onboarding guides, and system design documents. It is particularly valuable during team scaling when tribal knowledge needs to become written knowledge.
Feature Flag Rollout Roadmap
Feature flags enable gradual rollouts, A/B testing, and kill switches. But without a plan, they accumulate as permanent complexity. This roadmap plans the lifecycle of each flag: creation, rollout percentage schedule, full rollout, and cleanup (removing the flag from code). The template tracks flag debt alongside active flags so cleanup does not fall behind.
How to Choose the Right Template
Match the template to the technical challenge:
- Architecture changes → Technical Architecture Roadmap for the plan, Platform Roadmap for what you are building
- Moving systems → Platform Migration, Tech Stack Migration, or the general Migration Roadmap
- API work → API Roadmap for new capabilities, API Versioning for managing existing versions
- Operational maturity → DevOps, Security, Observability, or QA Roadmap based on which capability needs investment
- Debt and cleanup → Technical Debt Roadmap for code and design debt, Feature Flag Rollout Roadmap for flag cleanup
- Investigation → Technical Spike Roadmap when the team needs to explore before committing
For platform and infrastructure teams, start with the Platform Roadmap and the Infrastructure Roadmap as your primary planning artifacts. Layer in Security and Observability roadmaps as supporting plans. The strategy roadmap guide covers the broader strategy behind technical planning.