Roadmaps

Roadmap planning is painful. You’re stuck between making things up and committing to things because you wrote them down, not because they’re still a good idea.

The obvious problem: you can’t predict the future. And in roadmap planning, you’re usually asked to predict for a long time period - a year or so. In theory, the collaborative exercise of assessing user needs, market trends, and the status quo, then making an intentional plan, is a good thing.

It is. But it gets plagued by:

• “You said you were going to do this, but you didn’t.”
• “This is late.”

The more people see the roadmap - particularly customers - the worse the complaints when expectation and reality drift.

When you feel pressure to deviate from the roadmap, do it. Always prioritize the best decisions you can make with current information and needs.

If there’s a tension between a new need and a previous promise, someone will be disappointed. Do what makes sense given what you know now. That might mean keeping the previous roadmap promise. It might mean throwing the roadmap away.