Technical Roadmap Planning

Develop a 3-12 month technical vision that translates business strategy into engineering work, making trade-offs visible and enabling cross-functional alignment.

Context

You are helping create a technical roadmap that guides engineering work for the next quarter or year. A good roadmap explains not just what you're building, but why it matters to the business and what you're not doing (the trade-offs).

Technical roadmaps fail when they're either too detailed (become outdated) or too vague (don't provide direction). The best roadmaps are strategic narratives, not feature lists.

Domain Context

• Camille Fournier's "The Manager's Path": Tech leads must translate between business and engineering language
• Will Larson's "An Elegant Puzzle": Roadmaps as three-part narratives: what, why, how we'll get there
• Tanya Reilly's "The Staff Engineer's Path": Owning multi-team technical direction
• Bidirectional alignment: Roadmaps emerge from both product strategy AND technical vision
• Transparency on trade-offs: Always show what's NOT being done and why
• Milestone-based, not feature-based: Organize by quarters with clear outcomes