How Growth Managers Can Manage Growth Roadmaps

Growth roadmaps are meant to give you clear direction and focus. But for many growth managers, these plans turn into obsolete lists of ideas soon after you launch them.

That’s because you work across different teams: product, marketing, engineering, and analytics. So if you don’t have a unified view of priorities, the strategic plan becomes a static document. 

Here’s how you can build and manage growth roadmaps that adapt at the speed of your insights and execution.

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⭐ Featured Template

Use the ClickUp Project Request and Approval Template to set up and manage your growth roadmap instantly. This template includes Custom Fields for tracking metrics such as impact, cost, and probability, making it easy to prioritize the best initiatives. You can monitor progress using statuses such as Under Review, In Progress, and Approved, and visualize all growth initiatives across multiple views.

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Common Challenges in Managing Growth Roadmaps

To understand how growth managers can manage growth roadmaps effectively, you must have a deeper understanding of all the friction points that you are likely to run into. 

❌ Lack of centralized visibility

Growth managers are constantly pulled in two directions: holding the big-picture vision for the company, while managing the day-to-day hustle of keeping everything moving smoothly.

What makes this worse? Lack of visibility. 🔎

Instead of being one comprehensive system, the roadmap itself ends up scattered across different tools and documents:

• The original hypothesis and project requirements are in a Google Doc
• The latest data and experiment results are housed in an analytics tool
• Team workload, task statuses, etc., are tracked in a project management tool
• Decisions, updates, and key feedback are buried in email threads

Your growth team is always playing catch-up, hunting for information, and manually reconciling data rather than making decisions.

❌ Misaligned goals across teams

Another thing that throws teams off the same growth roadmap? Fragmented internal processes. Because teams are often rewarded based on their departmental KPIs (key performance indicators).

For example:

• The content team is focused on hitting targets for page views and time on page
• The acquisition team is focused on achieving a low cost per acquisition (CPA)
• The product team is focused on doing a higher number of new feature launches

The content team publishes articles that drive traffic but don’t support the experiments you need to validate activation.

The acquisition team scales channels that bring in low-quality users because it improves CPA, even if retention drops. The product team ships features that are unrelated to your growth experiments.

Each team looks successful in isolation, but the combined effect is zero progress on the actual growth goals.

❌ Difficulty prioritizing initiatives

When your product roadmap is scattered across multiple tools, it’s nearly impossible to create a priority list. Here, you lose the two core things you need for objective scoring:

• Confidence: It’s hard to prioritize initiatives confidently because you lack quick access to data to support your claims. For example, you rely on guesswork instead of data
• Effort: A manager might score an initiative as “easy” based on a two-month-old estimate, only to find the actual task in the engineering tool has been re-scored as “hard” due to new technical constraints

But most importantly, it’s impossible because prioritization is a continuous process. ♾️

When you work on an initiative, chances are that the new information will invalidate your old hypotheses. Or maybe a viral industry trend, a regulatory change, or a sudden competitive move demands immediate attention.  If you can’t pivot fast, you lose momentum.

❌ Disconnected trackers and updates

Different teams use department-specific tools for their work, rather than having everything in a single place.

Tasks are tracked on a project management tool. Growth is measured via an analytics tool. And your growth or product roadmap is somewhere else. 

For a growth manager, this means manually connecting the dots and regularly reviewing the entire roadmap. No wonder progress tracking becomes inefficient. This is work sprawl in action. And it’s costing companies a staggering $2.5 trillion in lost productivity annually. 

❌ Limited collaboration and slower feedback loops

Let’s see what it looks like when planning, implementation, and analysis are done in isolation: 

• Poor handoffs: Tasks get stuck in limbo because one team’s definition of “done” (e.g., “code merged”) doesn’t match the next team’s starting point (e.g., “code is ready for A/B testing”)
• Resistance to work: Teams that weren’t involved in planning often resist executing an initiative because they don’t understand the strategy behind it and instead view it as extra work
• Bad ideation: New ideas are generated in a vacuum and without a clear direction, ignoring the expensive lessons already paid for by previous experiments

With limited room for feedback and learning, the whole process becomes a top-down mandate instead of a team effort, leading to diminished success.

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Why Growth Managers Need Roadmaps (And What They Actually Use Them For)

Growth managers aren’t responsible for shipping features or launching campaigns in isolation. They’re accountable for orchestrating growth across teams, time horizons, and uncertainty.

A growth roadmap exists to support that responsibility, not to manage tasks.

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How to Effectively Manage Growth Roadmaps

Here’s a step-by-step guide for managing growth roadmaps correctly.

Step 1: Define strategic goals and initiatives

Start by defining your North Star Metric (NSM). This is the single, overarching metric that best captures the core value your product delivers to customers. It focuses on user value (the precursor to revenue). 

For instance, Spotify’s NSM is not “number of new subscribers,” but “Time Spent Listening.” The more users listen, the more valuable the product is to them, and the higher the likelihood of retention and long-term revenue.

Next, translate this high-level strategic vision into a measurable goal using Objectives and Key Results (aka OKRs):

• The objective is a qualitative statement of what you want to achieve. Say, significantly improve customer retention
• Key results are measurable, time-bound outcomes proving that the objective was met. They act as critical success factors for your main goal. It could be, reducing the 30-day churn rate from 15% to 10% by Q4

Once you’ve defined the OKRs, define initiatives for your roadmap that, when executed, will directly achieve the key results. Remember, initiatives are still broad themes like “improve onboarding experience,” and not individual tasks like “change button color.”

Step 2: Create a visual roadmap

Using spreadsheets to manage growth roadmaps in the era of digital transformations is like eating soup with a fork. It’s frustrating and impossible to keep track of.

Plus, roadmaps work better with a visual representation of how you’ll constantly evolve and a strategic approach to growing your business. Using rows and columns is simply not the best way to develop your roadmap.

When building yours, look for a tool that lets you easily build, share, and track your roadmap. 

For starters, use ClickUp Whiteboards to brainstorm, create, and share a centralized growth roadmap. 

The drag-and-drop canvas lets you map out your marketing and product roadmaps. Draw connections between shapes, add interactive elements, tag teammates, leave notes, and much more. 

Add sticky notes, shapes, and images to capture brainstormed ideas, high-level themes, product lifecycle, strategic milestones, etc. Color-code, cluster, and label them for clarity

Now comes the best part. Multiple people can add, move, comment on, or edit the elements in the whiteboard simultaneously. 

When the ideas are finalized, convert them into a Task within your Whiteboard. You can add task priority (Urgent, High, Normal, etc). 

Step 3: Prioritize initiatives effectively

Evaluate which growth initiatives offer the most value to customers and then build your prioritized list.

It’s best to adopt a standardized scoring framework here. This helps you put a number on the value of each initiative compared to the others.

Here are some popular scoring and prioritization methods you can try:

• ICE: You measure each project using three factors: Impact, Confidence, and Effort. You assign a numerical value (usually 1 to 10) to each, then add them up for the final ICE score. The higher the score, the more valuable the initiative
• RICE Prioritization Method: This is a more advanced version of ICE, which adds a fourth factor: Reach, to measure how many users the project will affect over a set time
• MoSCoW Method: This method sorts projects into four categories: Must-have (critical and non-negotiable for business growth), Should-have (important, high-value, but not critical), Could-have (nice-to-have, low cost), and Won’t-have (out of scope for this growth cycle)

Manually adding prioritization to all initiatives is time-consuming and a nightmare. We have a better suggestion. Leverage ClickUp Brain, our powerful AI assistant, to analyze all your growth initiatives and categorize them based on relevance, potential impact, and urgency.

ClickUp Brain analyzes your historical company data, project briefs, growth roadmaps, unique selling points, meeting notes, team chats, and other available resources. It then suggests the key initiatives that best match your business goals and product vision.

Step 4: Assign ownership and deadlines

Clear ownership ensures that every initiative has one accountable person driving it forward. Without it, tasks bounce between teams, experiments stall, and priorities quietly die in the backlog.

Start by assigning:

• A single DRI (Directly Responsible Individual): The person who owns the outcome, not just the task
• Collaborators: People contributing but not accountable
• A realistic deadline: Based on effort, dependencies, and available engineering/design bandwidth
• Status expectations: When updates are needed, how progress is reported, and what “done” looks like

As easy as this sounds, creating tasks and assigning them is actually tough, especially when you’re managing complex, long-term roadmaps. You need to constantly eliminate scope creep and make sure team members don’t get lost in a massive, flat task list.

To make this airtight, convert each initiative or experiment into a ClickUp Task. Add a clear owner, due date, priority, subtasks for execution, and dependencies for any cross-functional work.

While Tasks act as the execution layer for your growth roadmap, take it a step further with the ClickUp Brain + Task combo. It helps you keep ownership clear, eliminate scope creep, and move initiatives forward without manual project chasing:

• Auto-generate tasks from your roadmap notes or initiative briefs (Brain turns ideas into structured tasks with owners, subtasks, and priorities)
• Refine or clarify the scope by asking Brain to suggest missing steps, risks, or dependencies before work begins
• Assign the right owner automatically using task rules, capacity routing, or AI-suggested assignees
• Keep everyone aligned with Brain-generated summaries inside tasks for quick status updates and next steps

🚀 ClickUp Advantage: At this stage, Super Agents, and ClickUp Brain work together to transform manual workflows into logic-driven, self-adjusting sequences.

AI Agents act as intelligent automation partners. Instead of stacking triggers, conditions, and actions yourself, describe the outcome—and Brain can help to build out clear logic behind the scenes. Agents interpret context from tasks and comments, act autonomously, adapt to changing inputs, and drastically reduce setup time.

Build your first AI Agent

Step 5: Monitor progress and iterate continuously

Lastly, track both the impact of your growth plans and how well your team executed the initiatives in the first place. Be sure to look at: 

• Task and initiative status: What’s on track, stalled, or blocked
• Experiment performance: Which tests are showing early signals, which need more time, which should be stopped
• Key metrics tied to your North Star and OKRs: Are your initiatives actually moving the numbers that matter?
• Cross-functional dependencies: Are handoffs slowing things down? Do owners need support?
• Customer feedback and qualitative insights: Are users responding the way your hypotheses predicted?

ClickUp Dashboards give you a high-level, real-time view of everything happening across your growth roadmap. Monitor experiment progress, owner accountability, and key metrics, all from one place.

With ClickUp’s Cards, you can visualize every part of your growth roadmap the way you need. You get a card library with ready-made options to track progress, experiment velocity, workload, and performance across your roadmap.

Step 6: Bonus, close the loop with documentation 

Once an initiative wraps up, the owner must provide a clear conclusion: was the hypothesis valid or invalid?

• If it was valid, immediately start the next steps on the roadmap
• If it was invalid, deprioritize and archive any future projects that were based on those now-proven-false assumptions

These learnings are then stored in a living document so you can use them for future roadmaps.

ClickUp Docs serves as that single, shared knowledge repository for all the learnings, retrospectives, and best practices discovered during roadmap implementation. Docs are searchable and accessible to everyone. 

Here’s a bonus tip. Ask ClickUp Brain to summarize experiment outcomes and auto-link them to related Docs so your knowledge base grows with every cycle.

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Create a Successful Growth Roadmap with ClickUp

Managing your company’s entire roadmap is a massive responsibility that demands more than just good ideas. You need a structured, repeatable, and intelligent system that can turn strategic efforts into measurable results.

ClickUp solves this by giving you one integrated workspace not only to store your growth roadmaps, but also to do everything around them. 

It’s the only place you need to plan your goals, visualize roadmaps, prioritize initiatives, assign tasks, track real-time progress, and document all the feedback.

✅ Sign up for ClickUp today and transform the way your company grows.

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