Quick Answer (TL;DR)
This free Google Slides epic roadmap template gives you a presentation-ready visual of your product epics across a timeline. Built for stakeholder meetings, sprint reviews, and all-hands presentations — open it, customize the epics, and you have a polished roadmap deck in minutes.
What This Template Includes
Why Use Google Slides for Your Epic Roadmap
Google Slides is the presentation tool your stakeholders already use. When you need to walk leadership through the product plan in a meeting, a polished slide deck communicates more effectively than a spreadsheet or project management tool. Slides are designed for storytelling — they help you control the narrative around what the team is building and why.
The real-time collaboration of Google Slides means your entire product team can contribute to the deck. Engineers can update their epic status, designers can adjust visual elements, and PMs can refine the narrative — all in the same document without merge conflicts.
Google Slides also makes it easy to create a "snapshot in time" roadmap that you can reference later. Duplicate the deck at the start of each quarter to create a historical record. This is invaluable for retrospectives when you want to compare what you planned versus what you shipped.
Template Structure
Header and Context Bar
The top of the slide contains the roadmap title, the time period covered, and the date the slide was last updated. Including the "last updated" date is a small detail that builds enormous trust — stakeholders immediately know whether they are looking at current information or a stale artifact from last quarter. In Google Slides, this is a text box you can update with a single click. You can also include a one-line strategic theme or OKR reference to anchor the roadmap in business context.
Timeline Grid
The main body of the slide is a horizontal grid where the x-axis represents time (weeks, months, or quarters) and the y-axis represents teams, product areas, or strategic pillars. Epics appear as horizontal bars whose length indicates duration. In Google Slides, each epic bar is an editable shape — drag to resize, change fill colors, or add text labels. The grid should use subtle gridlines and generous whitespace. The most common mistake in roadmap slides is cramming too much information into a small space, which makes the slide unreadable and undermines its purpose.
Status and Progress Indicators
Each epic bar includes a visual progress indicator (percentage fill, checkmark icons, or a simple color shift from light to dark as work progresses). A small status badge — a colored dot or label reading "On Track," "At Risk," or "Blocked" — sits at the leading edge of each bar. This section maps to editable icon elements in the Google Slides template that you can swap or recolor. It lets the audience absorb delivery health at a glance without asking follow-up questions during the presentation.
Key Milestones Row
A dedicated row at the top or bottom of the timeline grid highlights major milestones. These are non-negotiable dates: product launches, conference demos, compliance deadlines, or funding milestones. Separating milestones from epics prevents the timeline from becoming cluttered and ensures that the most critical dates are never obscured by a dense cluster of epic bars.
Footnotes and Legend
The bottom of the slide includes a compact legend explaining the color scheme, status icons, and any abbreviations used. It also reserves space for a one-line footnote such as "Dates subject to change based on Q2 capacity planning" or "Excludes maintenance and support work." These footnotes preempt the most common stakeholder questions and save presentation time.
How to Use This Template
1. Make a copy and review the layout
What to do: Open the template and click File → Make a copy. Review the slide structure — timeline slides, summary slides, and supporting detail slides. Delete any slides you do not need and duplicate slides for additional timeframes.
Why it matters: Working from your own copy ensures you can customize freely. Reviewing the full deck structure before editing prevents duplicated effort and helps you decide which slides your audience actually needs.
2. Select your top epics from the working roadmap
What to do: Open your detailed epic roadmap (the operational version your team uses daily) and identify the 6-10 most significant epics for the time period you are presenting. Click on each epic bar in the slide and update the label with your real epic names. Adjust bar lengths to reflect planned duration and change colors to match your team or product area scheme.
Why it matters: A roadmap slide that shows 25 epics communicates nothing. Selecting the top initiatives forces you to clarify what truly matters this quarter, which is itself a valuable strategic exercise. The slide format demands ruthless prioritization of what is visible.
3. Write business-impact descriptions for each epic
What to do: For each epic on the slide, write one sentence that explains why this work matters in business terms, not technical terms. Instead of "Migrate to microservices architecture," write "Reduce deployment time by 80% to accelerate feature delivery." Add these as labels or speaker notes in Google Slides.
Why it matters: Stakeholders do not think in story points or architectural patterns. Translating epics into business language is the difference between a roadmap that gets approved and one that gets questioned.
4. Add status indicators and milestones
What to do: Apply status badges (On Track, At Risk, Blocked) to each epic based on the most recent data from your team. Position milestone markers (diamond shapes) on the key dates that matter to your stakeholders — launch dates, customer demos, regulatory deadlines. If an epic is at risk, include a one-line note in the speaker notes explaining the risk and your mitigation plan.
Why it matters: Walking into a stakeholder meeting with an "all green" roadmap when the team knows there are problems destroys trust faster than anything else. Proactively surfacing risks in the slide shows maturity and gives leadership the opportunity to help clear blockers.
5. Rehearse with speaker notes
What to do: Use the speaker notes scaffold to prepare a 2-3 minute verbal walkthrough of the slide. Follow the structure: context (what period and goals this covers), highlights (the 2-3 most important epics), risks (anything at risk or blocked), and ask (what you need from the audience). Present using Google Slides' presenter view to see your notes while the audience sees the deck.
Why it matters: The best roadmap slide in the world fails if the presenter stumbles through the narrative. A structured walkthrough ensures you stay concise and land your key messages without rambling.
When to Use This Template
Use the Google Slides epic roadmap any time you need to communicate your product plan to an audience that does not work in your day-to-day tools. This includes board meetings, executive leadership reviews, all-hands presentations, investor updates, and cross-functional planning sessions.
The slide format is intentionally limited. It is not a replacement for your working roadmap — it is a communication layer on top of it. Product managers who try to use a single artifact for both daily planning and stakeholder communication end up with something that serves neither purpose well. Keep your operational roadmap detailed (the Google Sheets epic roadmap template works well for this) and your presentation roadmap focused.
This template is especially valuable for product managers who present to non-technical stakeholders such as board members, marketing leaders, or sales executives. The color-coded layout and business-language epic summaries make the roadmap accessible to people who have never used Jira and do not need to.
Google Slides also makes it easy to create a historical record. Duplicate the deck at the start of each quarter, and over time you build a library of planned-vs-actual snapshots that are invaluable for improving estimation accuracy and planning retrospectives.