• Community

State of the Thunder 13: How We Make Our Roadmap

Welcome back to our thirteenth episode of State of the Thunder! Nothing unlucky about this latest installment, as Managing Director Ryan Sipes walks us through how Thunderbird creates its roadmap. Unlike other companies where roadmaps are driven solely by business needs, Thunderbird is working with our community governance and feedback from the wider user community to keep us honest even as we move forward.

Want to find out how to join future State of the Thunders? Be sure to join our Thunderbird planning mailing list for all the details.

Open Source, Open Roadmaps

In other companies, product managers tend to draft roadmaps based on business needs. Publishing that roadmap might be an afterthought, or might not happen at all. Thunderbird, however, is open source, so that’s not our process.

A quick history lesson provides some needed context. Eight years ago, Thunderbird was solely a community project driven by a community council. We didn’t have a roadmap like we do today. With the earlier loss of funding and support, the project was in triage mode. Since then, thanks to a wonderful user community who has donated their skill, time, and money, we’ve changed our roadmap process.

The Supernova release (Thunderbird 115) was where we first really focused on making a roadmap with a coherent product vision: a modernized app in performance and appearance. We developed this roadmap with input from the community, even if there was pushback to a UI change.

The 2026 Roadmap Process

At this point, the project has bylaws for the roadmap process, which unites the Thunderbird Council, MZLA staff, and user feedback. Over the past year we’ve added two new roadmaps: one for the Android app and another for ThunderbirdPro. (Note, iOS doesn’t have a roadmap yet. Our current goal is: let’s be able to receive email!) But even with these changes and additions, the Mozilla Manifesto is still at the heart of everything we do. We firmly believe that making roadmaps with community governance and feedback from the larger community keeps us honest and helps us make products that genuinely improve people’s lives.

Want to see how our 2025-2026 Roadmaps are taking shape? Check out the Desktop Roadmap, as well the mobile roadmaps for Android and iOS.

Questions

Integrating Community Contributions

In the past, community contributors have picked up “nice to have” issues and developed them alongside us. Or people want to pursue problems or challenges that affect them the most. Sometimes, either of these scenarios coincide with our roadmap, and we get features like the new drag and drop folders!

Needless to say, we love when the community helps us get the product where we hope it will go. Sometimes, we have to pause development because of shifted priorities, and we’re trying to get better at updating contributors when these shifts happen on places like the tb-planning and mobile-planning mailing lists.

And these community contributions aren’t just code! Testing is a crucial way to help make Thunderbird shine on desktop and mobile. Community suggestions on Mozilla Connect help us dream big, as we discussed in the last two episodes. Reporting bugs, either on Bugzilla for the desktop app or GitHub for the Android app, help us know when things aren’t working. We encourage our community to learn more about the Council, and don’t be afraid to get in touch with them at council@thunderbird.net.

Telemetry and the Roadmap

While we know there are passionate debates on telemetry in the open source community, we want to mention how respectful telemetry can make Thunderbird better. Our telemetry helps us see what features are important, and which ones just clutter up the UI. We don’t collect Personally Identifying Information (PII), and our code is open so you can check us on this. Unlike Outlook, who shares their data with 801 partners, we don’t. You can read all about what we use and how we use it here.

So if you have telemetry turned off, please, we ask you to turn it on, and if it’s already on, to keep it on! Especially if you’re a Linux user, enabling telemetry helps us have a better gauge of our Linux user base and how to best support you.

Roadmap Categories and Organizing

Should we try to ‘bucket’ similar items on our roadmap and spread development evenly between them, or should we concentrate on the bucket that needs it most? The answer to this question depends on who you ask! Sometimes we’re focused on a particular area of focus, like UI work in Supernova and current UX work in Calendar. Sometimes we’re working to pay down tech debt across our code. That effort in reducing tech debt can pave the way for future work, like the current efforts to modernize our database so we can have a true Conversation View and other features. Sometimes roadmaps reveal obstacles you have to overcome, and Ryan thinks we’re getting faster at this.

Where to see the roadmaps

The current desktop roadmap is here, while the current Android roadmap is on our GitHub repo. In the future, we’re hoping to update where these roadmaps live, how they look, and how you can interact with them. (Ryan is particularly partial to Obsidian’s roadmap.) We ultimately want our roadmaps to be storytelling devices, and to keep them more updated to any recent changes.

Current Calls for Involvement

Join us for the last few days of testing EWS mail support! Also, we had a fantastic time with the Ask a Fox replython, and would love if you helped us answer support questions on SUMO.

Watch the Video (also on PeerTube)

Listen to the Podcast