Quick Answer (TL;DR)
This free Google Sheets feature roadmap template helps product managers prioritize, schedule, and communicate planned features in a format that works for both internal teams and stakeholders. It combines a prioritization scoring framework with a timeline view — so your roadmap shows not just what you are building, but why those features were chosen over alternatives.
What This Template Includes
Why Use Google Sheets for Your Feature Roadmap
Feature roadmaps are the most frequently shared roadmap type — they go to engineering, design, sales, support, marketing, and customers. Google Sheets is the format most likely to be accessible to all of these audiences without requiring new tool access.
The spreadsheet format also supports the quantitative prioritization that feature roadmaps demand. RICE scoring, weighted scoring models, and cost-of-delay calculations all require formulas — and Sheets handles these natively. You can sort, filter, and pivot your feature list by any dimension without leaving the tool.
Google Sheets makes it easy to maintain multiple views of the same data. Use filters to show engineering only the features in their area. Create a separate "customer-facing" view that excludes internal features. Build a pivot table that summarizes features by quarter and category for executive reviews. All from the same underlying data.
Template Structure
Feature Backlog Tab
The backlog tab is the intake zone for all candidate features. Every idea, customer request, and internal suggestion starts here before being evaluated. Each entry captures a one-sentence description, the source of the request (customer feedback, sales, internal strategy), and a preliminary impact estimate. The backlog is intentionally unordered — prioritization happens using the scoring columns. Keeping intake separate from prioritization prevents premature commitment and ensures every idea gets a fair hearing. In Google Sheets, you can use data validation dropdowns for the "source" column to keep entries consistent and filterable.
Prioritization Scoring
This section applies the built-in RICE scoring columns to sort the backlog into a ranked list. Reach measures how many users a feature will affect in a quarter. Impact measures how much it will move the metric you care about. Confidence captures how certain you are about the estimates. Effort estimates person-months required. The template calculates the composite score automatically, giving the team an objective starting point for deciding which features deserve a spot on the roadmap. Features that score highest move into the active roadmap; everything else stays in the backlog for future reassessment. You can replace RICE with ICE, WSJF, or a simple value-vs-effort matrix — the column structure adapts to any scoring model.
Active Roadmap View
The active roadmap tab is the heart of the template. It displays committed features organized by release group or time horizon using monthly or quarterly columns. Each row shows the feature’s current status, assigned owner, effort size, and expected delivery window. The view is designed to answer three questions at a glance: What are we building? Who is working on it? When will it be ready? Limit the active roadmap to features your team can realistically deliver within the next two to three months to keep it credible and actionable. Use Sheets’ filter views to let different stakeholders see only the features relevant to them.
User Need and Business Goal Linkage
Every feature on the active roadmap should trace back to a user need and a business goal. The template provides mapping columns: feature name, the user problem it solves, and the business metric it moves. This linkage is invaluable during stakeholder reviews because it shifts the conversation from "What are we building?" to "Why are we building it?" — a far more productive question. In Sheets, you can use conditional formatting to highlight any row where the user need or business goal column is empty, ensuring nothing ships without clear justification.
Release Notes Draft
The template includes a lightweight release notes column where the team can begin drafting customer-facing descriptions as features move through development. Writing release notes early forces clarity of purpose — if you cannot explain the benefit of a feature in two sentences, the scope may need tightening. This also accelerates go-to-market preparation by giving marketing and support teams early visibility into what is shipping.
How to Use This Template
1. Build your feature backlog
Enter every feature request, idea, and planned enhancement into the backlog tab. Include a description, who requested it (customer, sales, support, internal), how many customers have asked for it, and which product area it belongs to. Do not filter or prioritize yet — capture everything first.
Why it matters: A full backlog prevents the "we forgot about that" moment three weeks into a sprint. Completeness at the intake stage ensures every idea gets a fair hearing before prioritization begins.
2. Score every feature
Use the RICE columns to score each feature consistently. Reach: how many users will this affect in a quarter? Impact: how much will it move the metric you care about (1-3 scale)? Confidence: how certain are you about the estimates (percentage)? Effort: how many person-months will this take? The template calculates the composite RICE score automatically. Involve at least one representative from engineering, design, and the business side to ensure balanced scoring.
Why it matters: Cross-functional scoring catches blind spots. Engineering may flag hidden complexity; the business side may reveal revenue implications that are not obvious from a technical perspective.
3. Stack rank and select
Sort features by RICE score, highest first. Select the top features that fit within your team’s capacity for the next quarter. Move selected features from "Proposed" to "Approved" status. The remaining features stay in the backlog — document why they were not selected so the decision is transparent.
Why it matters: Overcommitment is the single biggest cause of roadmap credibility loss. Committing to fewer features and delivering them consistently builds stakeholder confidence over time.
4. Assign to timeline
Place approved features on the monthly or quarterly timeline. Consider dependencies between features and balance the workload across months. Avoid front-loading all high-priority features into one month — distribute them to maintain a steady delivery cadence. Fill in the user need and business goal mapping columns for every committed feature.
Why it matters: Linkage ensures the team is building things that matter, not just things that are technically interesting or politically convenient. If a feature cannot be linked to a user need or business goal, reconsider whether it belongs on the roadmap.
5. Communicate and update
Share the roadmap with stakeholders. For external sharing, duplicate the sheet and remove internal-only columns (like effort scores and RICE data). Update feature status weekly during development. When features ship, update the status and capture the actual ship date for velocity tracking. Use the release notes column to draft customer-facing language as features approach completion.
Why it matters: A roadmap is a living document. Weekly reviews keep it accurate, surface blockers early, and maintain stakeholder trust. Stakeholders who see consistent delivery of past commitments give future roadmaps more credibility.
When to Use This Template
This template is designed for product teams that need to plan and communicate at the feature level — the granularity where engineering estimates are meaningful and design can begin wireframing. It works best when your team is building a single product and needs a clear, shared view of what is being built and why. The Google Sheets format makes it the right choice when your feature roadmap needs to reach engineering, design, sales, support, marketing, and customers — audiences that all already have access to Sheets.
This template is ideal for product managers who are overwhelmed by feature requests from multiple sources — customers, sales, support, and internal stakeholders. The RICE scoring framework provides a defensible, data-driven way to say "we are building X before Y because the data supports it." The spreadsheet format makes this scoring natural — formulas handle the math, and sorting reveals the priority order instantly.
Startups with a team of five to fifteen engineers will find this template hits the right balance between structure and overhead. Larger organizations can use it within individual product teams while rolling up to a portfolio or initiative roadmap for cross-team visibility. It also works well for product-led growth companies where feature velocity directly drives acquisition and retention metrics — the customer request tracking columns help you connect individual features to demand signals from your user base.
Teams focused on platform or infrastructure work rather than user-facing features may find a timeline-based roadmap or a Now-Next-Later roadmap more appropriate, since platform initiatives often do not map cleanly to discrete features. However, if your platform team delivers capabilities that other teams consume as features, this template can still serve as a useful communication layer.