Board Roadmap Engine

The Board roadmap engine gives your Product Owner a standing weekly assignment: look at the company's projects, the charter, recent releases, and the metrics, and come back with a themed set of roadmap ideas. You then approve or reject each idea individually — approved ones land in the backlog exactly like any task you'd written yourself.

It's off by default. The engine never authors content itself — it only opens the standing assignment; the Product Owner does the actual proposing.

Now rides the Board Programs registry

Roadmap was the first of what's now fourteen Board Programs — a generic trigger/propose/hold/learn engine the Product Owner, Head of Marketing, and Auditor all share. Nothing on this page changed: the flag, the cadence, the queue, and the item shape are all exactly what they were. Two things are new because of the move — the flag now doubles as this program's default on the Business → Programs tab (flip it there instead and the panel value takes over), and each cycle's outcome (what you approved, what you rejected and why) now feeds the next cycle's exploration prompt, closing a loop the engine never had before.

What it does

  • One open cycle at a time. The engine dedupes on source=board_roadmap non-terminal tasks — a new cycle is never opened while one is still awaiting either the Product Owner's authoring or your per-item decisions.
  • The engine itself never writes a single roadmap item. On its weekly tick (ROBOCO_ROADMAP_INTERVAL_SECONDS, default 604800s) it opens exactly one PENDING, held exploration task, assigned to the Product Owner (Team.BOARD, confirmed_by_human=False — skipped by every dispatcher until the Board's own dispatch spawns the PO for it).
  • The Product Owner does the actual work: once spawned, they explore the company's registered projects, the charter, recent releases, and current metrics, then call propose_roadmap() exactly once with a themed cycle of ROBOCO_ROADMAP_MIN_ITEMS_PER_CYCLE–ROBOCO_ROADMAP_MAX_ITEMS_PER_CYCLE item drafts (default 3–7) — a goal statement plus that many individual items, each with a title, description, rationale, team, and acceptance criteria.
  • You approve or reject item-by-item in the Roadmap Review Queue on the Command Center. Approving one item materializes it as an ordinary BACKLOG task (idempotent — approving an already-approved item is a no-op); rejecting records your reason, which feeds into the next cycle's prompt, but does not add anything to the backlog.
  • Nothing auto-starts. An approved item is just another BACKLOG task — it needs the same PM activation as anything else before an agent picks it up.
A themed cycle, not a task-by-task feed

The Product Owner proposes a coherent batch — one goal, several related items — rather than trickling in one idea at a time. That's why only one cycle is ever open: the next one doesn't start exploring until you've cleared every item in the current one (approved or rejected).

Bounds on the cycle

SettingDefaultMeaning
ROBOCO_ROADMAP_MIN_ITEMS_PER_CYCLE3Fewest item drafts a themed cycle must propose.
ROBOCO_ROADMAP_MAX_ITEMS_PER_CYCLE7Most item drafts a themed cycle may propose.
ROBOCO_ROADMAP_INTERVAL_SECONDS604800 (weekly)Seconds between exploration cycles.

Enable it

Settings → Feature Flags → "Board roadmap engine" arms the weekly cycle. There is nothing else to configure per project — the engine targets RoboCo's own registered project record.

Takes effect on the next backend restart

The flag persists in the settings store and applies on the next backend restart.

See the environment reference for the full flag list.

What changes when it's on

  • A weekly background tick opens one held exploration task for the Product Owner whenever no cycle is currently open.
  • The Roadmap Review Queue appears on the Command Center as soon as the Product Owner has authored a cycle — it's hidden entirely when there's nothing to review, the same as the other CEO decision queues.
  • Approving items grows the backlog; nothing starts on its own.

Next

→ Board Programs — the registry this program rides, and its thirteen siblings. → X (Twitter) engine — the other Board-facing held-queue capability. → Org & roles — what the Product Owner does day to day. → back to Optional subsystems.

llms.txt