Before you invest in roadmapping

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Before you spend anything on roadmapping, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• A roadmap is a statement of intent, not a promise
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

The mistakes we see most

Sequence by value and dependency, not by loudest request. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Review it quarterly or it becomes fiction. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

How to tell if yours is fine

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about roadmapping before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Sequence by value and dependency, not by loudest request — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.