The best project management system catches everything — it communicates who's responsible for what, shows where everything stands, and surfaces dependencies and edge cases.

This is especially true for engineering projects, because they directly impact the entire company. It's essential to have a proven, scalable system to execute these nuanced, complex initiatives. And as your team grows, when engineers are focused on their individual work, they'll also need full knowledge of assignments, timelines, development stages, and scope.

Here, we'll walk you through building a project management and roadmapping system tailored specifically for engineers (we use one like it at Notion). As we've seen across dozens of engineering teams, it'll help you track projects, ensure everyone's on the same page, and provide company-wide visibility into your work.

In this piece, you'll learn:

• To create a database for project management and roadmapping that's efficient and transparent.
• To organize this database with tags and views so you can quickly find what you need.
• Best practices from the Notion engineering team for effective project tracking.

Soon, you'll be able to create a roadmap for your engineering projects that looks like this:

Your engineering team needs a system

to manage projects

Not only do engineering projects impact the whole company — more importantly, they impact users. Your team is operating in a high-stakes environment. If deadlines slip or buggy products launch, there are major implications internally and externally.

In Notion, your team's project management and roadmapping system can:

• Track the status of every project — bugs, tasks, sprints and large projects can be easily moved from one stage to the next with complete visibility.
• Organize all the relevant materials for that project in one place — all code snippets, notes, images, or prototypes associated with a project are kept in a single place so your team can easily access them.
• Be viewed multiple ways to surface important information — slice a roadmap many different ways to show only what you want to see, like which projects an engineer is assigned, or all the bug fixes scheduled to ship this week.

How does this help your team?

• Ship fast, ship quality, save time — speed is a competitive advantage, so you need a system that'll allow you to maintain speed (and your quality bar) instead of worrying about the logistics of project management.
• Extend your team's capabilities — creating a scalable process allows your team to work on more projects with broader impact. And with a customizable roadmap, you can match the workflow to your specific team's needs.
• Transparency, both on your team and company-wide — a shared roadmap gives your engineers visibility into what everyone is working on, and the entire company can see the status of projects that relate to their work.