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How does a product go from idea to reality? The answer lies in your product roadmap.

You’ve presented investors with the big picture, and you have an idea of how your product will come together. Now it’s time to drill down into the details to create a roadmap outlining each step of 

. Your roadmap will show your team, developers, and other stakeholders exactly how you plan to execute your idea.

The best roadmaps do more than just communicate your plan—they engage your audience with an intuitive presentation and keep your team on track throughout development.

A product roadmap is a visual representation of how a product will develop over time. It lays out the features that are to be built in sequence to deliver on a company’s overall product strategy.

At its most basic, a product roadmap should include the following five things:

A roadmap is a plan for executing a strategy, so it should first orient people to the strategy it supports.

Product roadmaps lay out the order in which features will be developed, in accordance with the strategy.

 A timeline ties work to specific dates. This can be done with a short-term or long-term view. A short-term roadmap might break down work by week, whereas a longer-term roadmap might look at a quarter, half, or entire year.

 A roadmap shows who is responsible for each feature or task. Depending on the size and scope of the roadmap, this might cover departments, teams, or individuals.

 A roadmap needs to outline the work that goes into building each feature. A more high-level roadmap might chart broad workstreams undertaken by different teams, while a more granular roadmap might detail every task involved. Each item should be tied to a timeframe and the person or people who own its development.


With those five basic features, a product roadmap can take many forms. They often feature a Gantt chart: a table with a timeline on the horizontal axis and features or tasks on the vertical axis. Within the basic chart format, there’s a lot of flexibility. Some teams group tasks by their associated goals, while others group them by department.


Other popular formats include a Kanban board and a Now-Next-Later table.

While the main purpose of a product roadmap is to sequence feature development and provide a timeline for that work, good roadmaps also:

Allow everyone working on a product to see at a glance what they are responsible for, and how their role fits into the larger product vision.

Motivate team members by showing how their work impacts business goals.

Prevent team members from getting sidetracked by projects that aren’t on the roadmap.

Create transparency between different departments working on the same product.

Keep team members aligned on a shared goal.

How to build a product roadmap in 7 steps

Product roadmaps can serve different audiences—from executives to 

 to engineers—each of whom might need different levels of detail. Executives and salespeople might need a high-level roadmap with basic timelines for feature releases across multiple products. Engineering teams might need a more granular roadmap with individual work broken down by week. Tailor your roadmap to its audience, and consider making different versions of the roadmap for various stakeholders.

A good product roadmap is more than just a list of tasks with due dates. Start your product roadmap presentation by giving your audience an overview of the product strategy driving it. Doing so orientates stakeholders to the rationale behind the work, and shows how every piece contributes to the whole. Opening with the product strategy builds motivation, clarity, and alignment.

Once you’ve determined the scope of your roadmap, lay out all the work that needs to be done and estimate the time it will take to do it. Start to think about the sequencing—which features will yield insights that can inform future features? Which features have the highest potential to impact sales or other business outcomes? Which tasks are dependent on each other?


Once you have a rough list of features or tasks, get input from stakeholders to help prioritize items and develop realistic timelines for your roadmap. Set up meetings with department heads or other key players to determine who will own each task on the roadmap. Ensure the responsible parties have the resources to execute their tasks within the allotted time frame.

Once you know what needs to be in your roadmap, you’ll choose a tool to build and share it. Product roadmaps often have multiple inputs: Gantt charts, Kanbans, timelines, videos, and more. Make sure your tools allow you to pull multimedia elements together into a cohesive presentation.

If you want to start with a template, most tools offer ready-made options. Tome’s 

 helps you structure your entire product narrative, starting with a strategy overview, phases of work, and timelines with different levels of depth. 

Product Roadmap

Using your tool of choice, fill out your template or create your roadmap from a blank page.


Beyond the basics—strategy overview, timelines, and work assignments—you may also want to incorporate other useful information, such as relevant resources, risks, or dependencies. Some roadmaps also include user stories for each feature to help developers understand the product goals. A user story illustrates the end user’s needs in one sentence: “As a [user’s role], [user persona] wants [functionality] so that [they experience a benefit].”

Once you have a draft of your product roadmap, preview it to key stakeholders to get their approval and buy-in. Their input can help you identify and resolve any pain points or questions proactively, and ensure alignment before you disseminate information more widely across the company.

Finally, you may have to share the roadmap with leadership, individual teams or departments, or even the entire company. Tailor your 

 to the audience—for example, executives don’t need the same level of detail as engineers.


For leadership, keep your presentation high-level and demonstrate how the product aligns with business goals. When presenting to developers, you can get more granular, flagging particular dependencies and resources.


Provide everyone who needs access to the product roadmap with a link. If you have multiple versions of your roadmap, consider distributing one version to the entire company and sending more detailed versions to the relevant team members.

The roadmapping process doesn’t end after you’ve shared your product roadmap—far from it. In the product development phase, the roadmap is tested against reality. As development progresses, you may realize that you need to adjust your timelines or allocation of work to adapt to external circumstances and internal learnings.


The product team should continue to update the roadmap through development to keep it relevant. If the information on the product roadmap is outdated, your team will start to look elsewhere for answers.

Aim to revisit and update your roadmap on a regular cadence. Most product managers prefer to update their roadmaps weekly or at least once a month. When you update your roadmap, refer back to your product strategy to ensure your roadmap still aligns with the product goals.


Generally speaking, a product roadmap should give a high-level overview of the product timeline that anyone in your organization could understand. If you find your product roadmap growing into an unwieldy catchall for all things related to your product, you may need to revisit it and consider creating other resource hubs.

Your product roadmap is dynamic—and your presentation should be, too. Tome’s 

 is designed to outline the vision, direction, priorities and progress of your product, from start to ship. Pages have flexible layouts with infinite scroll and support interactive embeds such as images, videos, and live web links.

Tome’s generative AI, which can generate pages, images, and text in seconds, helps you get to a first draft of your roadmap faster. Tome also supports 

—from Figma files, Gantt charts built in Miro to Kanban boards built in Airtable.

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Keep everyone in the loop as you document milestones and collaborate on plans.

Don't make decks, make progress

How to Create an Effective Product Roadmap

You know the lovely fugue state we all enter while scrolling through real estate listings or design reels on Instagram? Leave it to the endlessly-articulate Rebecca Solnit to so neatly capture the machinations behind it.

“Admiring houses from the outside is often about imagining entering them,”

, an essay from her collection The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, 

“living in them, having a calmer, more harmonious, deeper life.”

Images, particularly of interiors, have the ability to catapult us into spaces; your design portfolio, done right, can be one such portal into your creative kingdom for potential clients, press, collaborators, and employers.

An interior design portfolio is a visual compilation of past work that communicates your unique point of view. This perspective may be represented across a portfolio website, social media page, and a standalone document that you can send alongside a resume.

The goal of an interior design portfolio is to provide interested parties a sense of your creative signature across projects. If you’re applying for a job at design firms, they may be looking for a sensibility that complements their established aesthetic, or proof of intuitive designing skills that could be developed further. If you’re seeking private clients, they might want to see how well you solve spatial challenges, conceptualize remodels, or amplify someone’s sense of style. A portfolio aimed at editorial consideration might showcase your most distinctive or idiosyncratic work.

A portfolio is meant to capture your point of view as a designer, but how you do that is up to you. While beautiful photographs of design projects are expected, you may find it useful to include pieces of your creative process, like sketches and renderings, if they’re among your strengths.


A well-rounded online portfolio contains:

Photography is the preferred medium here, but some projects may benefit from some supporting sketches or mood boards.

Open or close with a brief personal biography, where you can mention education and relevant work experience, mentors, or apprenticeships.

If you specialize in a particular area, like sustainable design, kitchens, or art procurement, reserve a spot on your bio page to say so, and consider adding a service page to highlight.


The following interior design portfolio was created using Tome’s 

View Tome

This interior design portfolio example includes the following elements:


The simple cover page and table of contents set the tone and let the portfolio recipient know what it includes


The bio covers the designers education, experience, areas of focus, and media coverage.


The interiors page gives an overview of each project featured in the portfolio.


The project detail page goes deep on the specifics of the project. This is where photography should shine. 

The closing page shares website and social media information, in case the reader wants to research further. It might also include a headshot and basic contact information.

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Tome has everything you need to tell your story, faster.

Make an impactful first impression


5 Tips for creating a standout interior design portfolio

When it comes time to assemble your portfolio, a few key principles should guide your way. For Josh Greene of New York City’s 

—and who was recently named as one of the top design firms on AD100—a portfolio contains just as much design consideration as the properties within it.

“Interior design is a visual business, so the most important asset you can have is beautiful photography,” Greene says. “You really have to build relationships with photographers that you like, and make the effort to get something photographed.”

That might feel easier said than done, but you have to start somewhere: Greene recommends making note of the photographers behind the images that catch your eye in magazines, or on social media. “If there are designers you admire whose style you think might be similar to yours, look for the photographers they’re working with,” he says. “It’s worth the money to work with somebody good.”

2. Show your process in creative ways—especially if you’re just starting out

If you don’t have much professional work to show yet (perhaps you’re an interior design student or just out of school) try to capture what your process 

 look like. Create mood boards for theoretical properties, and be prepared to speak to choices you’ve made.


“When I was starting out, I photographed my own apartment,” Greene says. “I showed what professional work I had, and then I would create concepts, like ‘Parisian apartment.’ I’d pull specific items—this coffee table, this fabric, this piece of art, this lamp—and I’d make these beautiful mood boards. I remember I had several of those in the back of my portfolio.”


And, Greene adds, it doesn’t have to be limited to spaces you’ve designed. “I hired somebody whose portfolio I loved; she was an architect but she was also a painter. I really liked her paintings, and I thought, ‘Somebody who can paint this way, with this color sensibility, can work in my office.’ There are other ways to show people that you have a creative eye.”

3. Keep graphic design cohesive—and bold

Fonts, logos, and overall design style should be consistent across your website, PDFs, and any other brand collateral, like business cards. And remember: This is not the time to blend in.

Josh Greene

Josh Greene Design, a New York-based interior design studio, AD100 Honoree

“I’m shocked at how many resumes and portfolios I see where people choose a really basic font,” Greene says. “A resume that stands out is creative and has a clear presentation style: You’re asking to work as a creative professional—what you put out in the world should look that way.”

It’s a good idea to add some context to the projects you highlight, but try not to go overboard with too many details about the client, the setting, the input, or the hurdles you faced. Aim for a tight descriptive sentence per project that gives a sense of the setting and style, and leave the rest for an in-person conversation.


“Every project has crazy little details and things, but that’s what you should be talking about in [an] interview, where you can talk them through those details or answer the questions they have.”


Edit for your strongest images and let them speak for themselves. “Show me the truest reflection of your vision,” says Greene. “You don’t need to include every single image of a project, unless each image is incredible.”

Once you’ve built up a large enough collection of images, portfolios can present an opportunity for curation. “If I’m pitching for a certain type of project, I’ll put together a deck that’s more of that kind of work,” says Greene. “That might include things from my website, things that are under editorial consideration or are not going to be published at all.” From there, he’ll tailor a document that can be shared privately.

Create an interior design portfolio with Tome

Your style is dynamic—and your portfolio design should be, too. Tome’s 

 go beyond a standard slide deck format: Choose from flexible page layouts with infinite scroll capabilities and full multimedia support (think time-lapse project videos and voice notes from the field). Brainstorming with clients? Share access for easy collaborations and drop mood boards into your presentation for at-a-glance inspiration—or, use 

 to visualize possibilities with creative prompts.

Showcase your portfolio with professionally designed templates

Work Portfolio

Mood Board – Creative

Sales Pitch

One Page Website

How to Create an Eye-Catching Interior Design Portfolio

Generative AI is making waves across the workforce, but the application that’s often top-of-mind is content creation and storytelling—think: drafting sales emails and honing pitches. In fact, according to a 

, this is one of the most common uses of AI among salespeople—along with data analysis and automating personalized communications.

But generative AI has the potential to improve many more sales team workflows, including onboarding and training—an area in need of attention from sales leaders in remote or hybrid environments. According to a 

, 39% of sales leaders say remote work has rendered their onboarding process obsolete, and only 26% say their onboarding process is customized to adjust to a new hire’s strengths and weaknesses. New AI tools promise to optimize the sales training process, from creation of materials to ongoing coaching. Here are some of the latest AI innovations transforming sales training.

AI can transform the training process from onboarding to ongoing development. Here are a few of the best ways to incorporate AI for sales training:

As a sales leader, creating onboarding materials for new hires requires a big investment of your time. Allego reports that about half of onboarding happens asynchronously—which means you’re responsible for creating or overseeing the creation of all the materials needed for self-guided learning. You’ll likely need to compile both video and written resources, and make them accessible on multiple devices, including mobile. But a typical slide deck is less-than-ideal for a mobile screen.


Tome’s AI-powered canvas offers an innovative medium for training materials that blends the page-flipping, visual format of a slide deck with the infinite scroll capability of a web page. Tome's pages can support 

, so you can include everything from videos to charts and graphs to quizzes. Video narration allows you to highlight critical context that might not come through in a deck’s static content, ensuring nothing gets lost in your asynchronous training.


Designed templates also allow you to quickly create everything from one-sheeters to case studies to lengthy training presentations, and Tome’s AI also helps you get to a first draft more quickly, creating pages, images, and text based on your prompt in seconds.

Professional Templates for Sales Teams

Sales Sell Sheet

Sales Report

Sales Enablement Program

Role play is a classic sales-training technique. It allows new hires to practice real-world scenarios and develop their sales skills without risking live opportunities.


Role playing typically requires you to pair new hires with seasoned sales professionals to play scenarios that follow or are inspired by a script. AI is now enabling sales teams to use conversational bots in place of a human role-playing partner—which keeps the more senior members of your sales team focused on selling, while new hires practice with a bot.

“In order to get significantly better at having conversations, you have to have about 30 of those conversations with that same buyer persona,” Bryant University professor and RNMKRS cofounder Dr. Stefanie Boyer 

 uses cartoonlike animated AI bots to simulate real video calls; other apps, like 

, place sales reps on video calls with a “live action” chatbot that looks remarkably like an actual human (though their robotic voices give them away).


When conversing with a bot instead of a human training partner, new sales reps might feel less afraid of making mistakes or wasting their practice partners’ time during these training sessions. As a bonus, most sales-training software offers actionable feedback during or immediately following the role-play session. The Second Nature app, for example, flags sales reps’ use of filler words.

Personalization and continuous learning are two big drivers of sales team success. But it can be challenging to keep track of individual coaching needs, let alone provide every team member with personalized help. According to Salesforce's 2022 report, only 26% of sales professionals receive weekly one-on-one coaching.


AI-powered sales coaching can help fill this gap. Instead of listening to hours of recorded calls and providing feedback after the fact, an AI sales coach can provide real-time feedback and talking points during a sales call. As a manager, you can’t listen to every sales call, but your AI assistant can.


 feature, which transcribes calls as you speak and drops notes like “You’re speaking too fast, slow down!” throughout the call. It also shares relevant information when triggered by key phrases. For example, if a customer mentions a competitor, the AI assistant can provide data or a case study showcasing your company’s advantage over the competition.


, which tracks delivery metrics like talk ratio, longest monologue, longest customer story, interactivity, and patience. It can also track content based on keywords and phrases, yielding insights like “top performers talk 30% more about security.” At the end of the call, Gong makes AI-powered recommendations based on both content and delivery.


 tracks tone, speed, key terms, and restricted phrases in real time and then uses AI to provide a score out of 10 plus actionable insights about a pitch like “it could benefit from providing more specific examples.”


Dialpad, Gong, and SalesHood also allow you to develop a custom training program based on AI-generated analysis of team performance. Their AI component can help you identify example calls and organize them into folders or paths to create an on-demand training library. For example, Gong uses AI to transform your winning reps’ approach into a playbook that other people on the team can use.

4 considerations for incorporating AI into your sales training process

Before implementing AI into your sales training, there are a few things to consider.

First and foremost, AI tools should solve problems for you and your team. Take stock of the pain points that are creating friction or impacting performance. For example:

Do your training materials suit your current workforce and policies?

 If your team is remote or hybrid but your onboarding materials rely on in-person seminars, you might want to consider a refresh, adding video and/or interactive elements.

Consider also asking recently hired teammates for feedback on the materials or using a quiz to assess information retention. If the materials are falling flat, you might want to revisit them. Tome can help you quickly overhaul your training decks with professionally-designed 

, and ensure it’s optimized for any screen size.

Are new team members taking too long to reach productivity?

, it can take nine months for sales reps to reach competency and 15 months to become a top performer. If it takes upwards of a year for new hires to start contributing to the bottom line, you might consider new ways to improve time to productivity, such as offering personalized coaching, increasing role-playing opportunities, and tracking and analyzing training progress using AI tools.

Does your training program scale (and do you need it to)?

 AI can help you unlock scale for a rapidly growing team. Using bots as practice partners rather than humans allows a theoretically infinite number of sales reps to role-play sales scenarios on their own schedules. AI tools can also help automate your feedback loop with reps in training by providing real-time and aggregated insights. Finally, if the volume of materials you need to create has increased dramatically, Tome’s gen AI-assist can help you create more, faster.

2. What capabilities does your current tech stack have?

Sales teams can actually suffer from having too many tools—they can create confusion and fragmentation, and can lead to overspending. According to Salesforce's 2022 report, 66% of sales reps say they’re overwhelmed by too many tools. The average number of tools in a company’s sales tech stack is 13, but on average, salespeople use just eight of those tools regularly, according to a 

Before adding new software to your tech stack, take stock of your current tools. How many tools does your team currently work with? What do those tools allow your team to do, and where are there gaps? Finally, could adding a new tool also create an opportunity for retiring an older one that’s under-used?

You won’t know whether an AI tool works for your sales team if you don’t have specific metrics to measure the success of the tool.


Maybe your goal is for sales managers to spend less time training new hires. Set actionable, measurable goals, like decreasing the time managers spend on training by 20% or reducing new hires’ ramp-up time by 10%.

4. How will you drive adoption on your team?

, 53% of sales team members do not know how to get the most value out of gen AI at work. A tool can look great on paper, but if your team can’t use it confidently, even the most impressive tool will end up ignored. 

Before implementing any new tool, make sure you have a plan to educate the team about how to use it and a way to track adoption. When choosing a tool, you might also consider how intuitive the tool is to use. If a tool is more complicated, find out if the company provides training sessions, and determine whether training your team in this new technology is a worthwhile endeavor. Your team may actually be excited to learn how to use these new tools—that same Salesforce survey found that 63% percent of sales team members expect training in 

AI is a game-changer for sales teams, offering innovative solutions for training, 

 Discover how sales teams are leveraging 

Learn more

Use Tome's AI to draft sales pitches, RFP responses, case studies, or any topic in seconds.

Tome Blog

How to Create an Effective Product Roadmap

How to Create an Eye-Catching Interior Design Portfolio

How Sales Leaders are Using Generative AI to Train Their Teams

Craft your next
great idea.

Tome Blog

How to Create an Effective Product Roadmap

How to Create an Eye-Catching Interior Design Portfolio

How Sales Leaders are Using Generative AI to Train Their Teams

Craft your nextgreat idea.

Craft your next
great idea.