Product Roadmap

A roadmap is a communication tool, not a promise to ship a feature list on fixed dates. The costly failure it prevents is double-sided: a Gantt chart of dated features sets the team up to publicly "miss the roadmap" within two months, while a roadmap with no trade-offs is a wishlist that aligns nobody. This skill builds one that aligns the organization around outcomes and survives contact with reality.

Operating procedure

Step 1: Gather inputs and anchor to strategy

Collect before building; where an input is missing, that is upstream work, not a blank to improvise:

• Vision - where the product is going in 1-3 years.
• Goals - the 2-4 outcomes for this period (growth, retention, expansion). More than 4 goals means no goals; send goal-setting itself to okr-builder.
• Target users and problems - who is served and what pain is being solved.
• The candidate list: everything currently being considered, with rough effort and any evidence of value.

Every roadmap item must trace back to a goal. An item that traces to no goal gets questioned, and either a goal is missing or the item is.

Step 2: Organize by themes, not features