Blog
I Hate Roadmaps
Feature roadmaps bore customers and waste executive time. What matters is whether the team understands vision, strategy, customers, and the value they’re trying to create—for the customer and the business. If that thinking is solid, you can trust the roadmap; if it’s weak, debating features won’t fix it. Value chunking reframes the plan as cohesive statements of customer and business value on a timeline, not a pile of ingredients. Review the thinking and the value, then end the meeting.
I hate roadmaps. They’re boring.
I don’t know how many thousands of times I’ve been asked to present our roadmap to a customer.
I never did.
I’d show up and talk about vision and strategy instead. Because your customers don’t care nearly as much about your feature roadmap as you think they do. And, frankly, neither should your executives.
Don’t get me wrong. Somebody, closer to the teams doing the work, needs to understand what features are being built and when. But when I sit down with a team to “review the roadmap,” that’s not really what I’m interested in. I want to understand their thinking.
Do they understand the vision? Is there a clear strategy? Do they deeply understand the customers and their needs? What value are they trying to create - for customers and for the business?
If we’re aligned on those things, I can generally trust the team to produce a good roadmap.
And if the roadmap is weak, endlessly debating the features on it probably won’t fix the problem. The weakness is often upstream.
Fix the thinking that produced the roadmap and you get something much more valuable than a better roadmap: You get a more autonomous and effective team.
Years ago, I coined an approach to roadmaps that I call value chunking. Instead of starting with features, I want to know the cohesive chunks of value our customers will experience as we deliver our solution. Those chunks can still be placed on a timeline. They are not descriptions of features, rather they are statements of value. Each one should answer two questions:
What value will this create for the customer? What value will this create for the business?
The business value might be a metric we expect to move or a strategic position we expect to attain.
For customer value, I sometimes ask teams: What is Marketing going to tell customers when this cohesive chunk of goodness hits the market?
Think about it this way.
Are you delivering dead cow on ground wheat with cruciferous vegetables? Or are you creating a savory meal that brings friends and family together?
Features describe the ingredients. Value describes the experience.
And at the end of the day, that’s what matters. If we delivered a bucket of features but failed to deliver the value, who cares?
So the next time you sit down for a roadmap review, resist the temptation to spend the meeting debating features and dates.
Review the thinking. Review the value. Then end the meeting.
Life is too short for another two-hour feature roadmap review.