Free swimlane timeline maker — no signup, 4K image for PowerPoint

What you get when you open it

Nine items across four team lanes (platform, apps, data and operations), with a dependency chain running between them and a cutover milestone. The shared API item has two lanes waiting on it, which is the situation swimlanes exist to show.

Drag a bar to move it, or drag its edge to change its length. A second saved view shows the milestones alone, which is usually what a steering group means when it asks for "the timeline".

Why lanes at all?

Because four teams on four separate timelines can’t show you the handoff, and the handoff is where programmes go wrong. One chart, one axis, one place where two lanes touch in the same week.

A lane is whatever select field you group by: team, workstream or region. Avoid status. Horizontal position already carries time, so a lane called In progress puts the same item in two places at once.

Getting four lanes onto one slide

Name a frame and the chart renders into it. For 16:9 that’s a 4K image, 3840 × 2160, scaled so all four lanes fit. This is where lane discipline pays off: six lanes still read at that width, and nine don’t, whatever resolution you ask for.

The file you get is a picture for the slide. That’s the useful behaviour here, because the alternative is a dozen rectangles somebody has to nudge back into line every time a handoff moves.

An image gets questions and a file gets edits, so for a programme audience an image is almost always right. The guide to sharing a product roadmap covers the other cases.

For a worked example with a leadership view already saved, the Swimlane roadmap template opens with twelve items. For a single track with no lanes, the Timeline maker is the simpler start.