A World Without Roadmaps

"Look Mom! No hands!" What would really happen if we ditched our product roadmaps?

Well, here I am. A Product Manager suggesting that we remove the most precious asset we have as Product folks: the roadmap. The holy grail. One of the few pieces of collateral the Product team gets to own. And I’m going to write a couple hundred words around not needing one.

I started in a fractional Product leadership role in February. Upon joining I felt an intense amount of backlash, territorialism and distrust from the Engineers. Still feel it today to be frank. As a New Englander, the analogy I make is that it felt like leaving the warm confines of my home on a January day and stepping out into windy, bitter cold. It stings.

Before long, I realized that the team had their own way of doing things, including a roadmap. I didn’t stomp my foot like I wanted to. Instead, I asked to see it. I wasn’t surprised to witness what looked like a copy and paste from a JIRA backlog. It was a list of stuff in no particular order with no obvious business value. It was in a google sheet. It had links to JIRA. It had ugly color coding and different fonts for labeling. I attempted to coach the team on standard roadmapping approach but I didn’t get far. I closed their roadmap quickly and set out to create my own proper roadmap as I had every stop in my career.

Then, something strange happened. I didn’t create a new roadmap. The Engineering roadmap still exists and they quite like it. Customers never see it, nor does anyone at our company outside of Engineering. It’s not a roadmap, as we all know.

I realize that I could create a real roadmap, walk the team through it and slowly get buy-in. Or just operate with my own. But I realized I didn’t need to. We have 3-4 big things that we’re building and we share that update with clients. We have a couple of slides on each that speak to the value. We alert them that those items are on the short-term horizon. Everything else is a candidate to make the short list of 3-4 big things and we try our best to track how often customers ask us for those things.

We are getting by fine. We’re not contractual with customers. We’re confident. We focus on the big boulders and lean into their value rather than dance around 30 features spread out across timelines that rarely pan out at most companies.

This model works for us. Full disclosure: We’re a very small team and a small business. I understand that at larger companies the roadmap is a tool for Sales teams to paint a picture of the future or prove to clients that their needs are in the development team’s plans.

But I’d ask you to at least consider how vital the roadmap really is. How much time do you spend laboring over dates and priorities? Instead, what if you leaned harder into the “here and now” features? The here and now has a higher probability of deployment. The here and now is looking for beta customers. The here and now is innovation capital, especially if you can demo something, even a mockup.

If you can demonstrate the here and now with conviction, speak to the items you’re considering for the future, and paint a vision (not a list of features) for the far-out future, what more do you need?