It's easy to get lost in a myriad of tools and manage one thing in Jira and another elsewhere. Jira's usefulness lies within aggregating all necessary date in one place and being able to view and manipulate it in different ways.
Roadmaps, for example, can be managed directly in Jira, in a easy-to-manage Kanban view. Consider a "Now, Next, Later" model, which can be used out of the box without any expensive add-ons such as Portfolio or Structure.
The main benefits of this approach are:
- Easy to understand. There is no ambiguity in what "Now", "Next", or "Later" means.
- Easy to update. The roadmap can be viewed during every sprint planning, and can be updated on the spot. The maintenance required is minutes per week instead of manually syncing data to spreadsheets or other tools.
- Manage across teams. Since Jira's boards allow you to aggregate issues however you want, you could easily view Epics from multiple projects or boards, or quite literally everything in Jira all in one place if you'd like.
The setup is easy:
- Create a new Kanban board.
- Use a JQL query to limit the results of the board to just Epics. E.g. issuetype = Epics
- Configure the columns. Create three columns: "Now", "Next", "Later". And map all statuses to one of these three columns.