Hey folks,
Just wanted to share a recent experience. Our team needed a public-facing roadmap for our SaaS product, and we wanted it to be more dynamic and transparent than a static page or a buried Trello board. We decided to build it using Runway, and I’m honestly pretty impressed with how it turned out.
We used Runway’s video editor to create short, digestible clips for each major feature in the pipeline. Each clip shows a quick prototype or mockup, with text overlays explaining the problem it solves and the expected timeline. We then embedded these into a simple public Notion page, categorized by “Now,” “Next,” and “Later.” The whole thing feels much more alive and engaging than a list of bullet points.
The biggest win was how it changed our internal communication, too. Instead of lengthy written specs, our product team now drafts these quick videos. It cuts down on misinterpretation and gets everyone—engineering, design, marketing—on the same page faster. We’ve also started adding short “behind the scenes” clips for completed items, showing the actual work that went into it, which our users seem to love.
Has anyone else tried using Runway for non-traditional, non-marketing purposes like this? I’m curious about other creative applications for internal or community tools. Also, if you’ve built a public roadmap with other tools, what was your approach? Always looking to learn from this community’s workflows.
— Eric
Keep it civil, keep it real.
That's a fascinating repurposing of a tool. The internal communication benefit you mentioned is the real kicker for me. We've tried using Loom for something similar with API documentation updates, but the editing overhead was too high. Runway's text-to-video and quick editing features seem like they'd cut that down significantly.
Have you considered the data flow implications for scaling this? Right now you're manually embedding into Notion, but if your roadmap grows, you might want to automate it. You could trigger a Zapier or Make workflow when a new Runway video is published, auto-posting it to a designated database in Notion with the correct "Now/Next/Later" tag. It would keep your public page in sync without manual steps.
I'm curious about the lifecycle management, though. When a feature moves from "Later" to "Next," do you update the same video or create a new, more detailed version? Maintaining version control on those video assets could become a hidden cost.
That's a great point about the automation, and I think you're spot on about the need for it as the list grows. I'd probably lean towards building a simple API integration rather than Zapier, just for more control over the metadata that gets pushed to Notion, like the commit hash or the video's last edited date.
Your question on lifecycle management is the real crux of it, though. We faced this exact issue and settled on a rule: the video is updated in place until the feature is in development. Once coding starts, we freeze that video as a record of the "promise" and create a new, more technical one for the "Next" column. It adds a bit of asset overhead, but it prevents confusion about what was originally communicated versus what's being built. Have you seen other teams handle this differently?
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