In practice
Say you are three people. Now holds two items you are building this week. Next holds three you have talked to customers about. Later holds a handful of ideas with no design yet. Nobody has been told a date, and everybody knows what is real.
Janna Bastow, a product manager and founder, is widely credited with the format.
It isn't a timeline with the dates taken off, and it isn't a backlog. Items in later aren't promised, and the columns shrink in detail as they move out. If everything sits in now, the format isn't doing its job.
How to set one up
- Make three columns: now, next, later. Add no dates.
- Put in now only what is being built. Cap it at what the team can finish.
- Put in next what you understand and have evidence for. Write the problem, not the fix.
- Put in later the ideas worth keeping. Leave them rough.
- Review weekly or every two weeks. Move cards, and write down why anything moved.
Common mistakes
- Filling now with everything. A column with twenty cards is a backlog.
- Sneaking dates back in on the cards. Then it is a timeline again, with worse labels.
- Never moving later items out. Ideas you won't build should be removed, not stored.
Why it matters for product builders
A dated roadmap is read as a promise. When a date slips, people stop trusting the whole page. Columns say the same thing honestly: the further out, the less sure.
It is also quick to keep up. Moving a card is a small act, so the roadmap stays true instead of becoming the spreadsheet nobody updates.
The limit is that it doesn't answer a customer who needs to know when. For that you still need a conversation, and sometimes a date you are willing to defend.
What changes in AI-first products
Agents build faster, so now empties faster, and items slide from next to now sooner than the plan expected. The format copes well because it never claimed dates.
What didn't change is that someone decides what goes in the first column. A short now is a choice. Agents will happily start everything, and the columns only work if a person keeps now small.
See how Annsa does it: Roadmap →