Successful Roadmaps Avoid One Thing: Drift
Golden rules for roadmap management.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” — Mike Tyson
I’ve wrestled with weak roadmaps — even some downright disasters. It’s not that I didn’t understand the importance of a clear, solid start. The issue wasn’t the beginning. It was something that happened over time, a term I’ve coined ‘roadmap drift’.
Product managers and their teams start with enthusiasm, hit the ground running, and create a solid roadmap. But as time passes, they’re hit with fire drills, ongoing discovery, reprioritization — the works. And just like that, the roadmap succumbs to drift — a result of unintended neglect.
For me, one case of drift in my past stands out.
Our product was evolving rapidly and haphazardly. Facing a company funding deadline, we pivoted to a new market with more potential. Even the best entrepreneurs give in to impress investors at times.
The whirlwind of change, driven by intense collaboration with design and engineering, was short-term focused — almost to a fault. We were in ‘hardcore mode,’ as Elon Musk might say, and our roadmap took a backseat.
It was a storm of activity with all hands on deck.
Yet somehow, despite the chaos, we triumphed. We secured a company saving investment. And we now had a handful of committed customers in the new market.
Then we hit pause. What was the next move? Where were we heading? The roadmap provided no answer.
In our excitement, our roadmap drifted off course and left us stranded on an unfamiliar island. It was time to reset and reinvest in our strategy and roadmap.
Understanding Roadmap Drift
Roadmap drift is simple — it’s the consequence of neglect.
The minute you create the roadmap- it needs to be updated. Just as you learn and pivot, your roadmap must do the same.
Roadmap drift is, therefore, the unintentional result of neglect over time. Your product is heading in a direction divergent from the direction documented in the roadmap.
Conversely, good roadmap hygiene is more than unwavering adherence to the initial plan. It’s about evolving your roadmap to reflect reality.
The goal of good roadmap hygiene is that at any moment, without forewarning, you can show your roadmap to anyone, and it represnets the true path forward — in line with the product’s direction.
Best Practices and Strategies for Roadmap Hygiene
Just as you can brush your teeth and have poor dental hygiene, you can update your roadmap and still experience drift.
Good dental hygiene requires a few things: brushing more than once per day, flossing, using mouthwash, and visiting the dentist. The same is true for your roadmap — it takes more than diligence. To succeed, you must adhere to a set of best practices or, as I call them — golden rules.
So without further adieu, here are some proactive tips to maintain excellent roadmap health — no flossing required:
- Continuously sync to the vision and strategy. When you are in the day-to-day, it’s easy to lose sight. Focusing on the short-term, quarter-to-quarter, or annual roadmap can lead to significant drift from your north star. As a matter of practice, review your vision and product strategy at the same time as you review your roadmap. And if your vision and strategy are no longer working, revisit and revise them.
- Don’t make promises you can’t keep. In the moment, it’s tempting to tell stakeholders and customers what they want to hear. Take a breath instead. Committing without thinking will cause you pain down the road. Don’t get caught up in the moment; take the request away, sync with the team, then commit.
- Anchor in business value. No business value, no outcome, no go. Hold firm. If you don’t have this information, remove the feature from the roadmap and move it to the backlog for further discovery.
- Plan your allocations upfront. I can’t tell you what allocations will work for your product. However, you should set aside time for product health, to resolve technical debt, and for emergency fixes before you prioritize new and exciting capabilities.
- Leave space for user feedback. Tie feedback-based changes to tests planned for the current development cycle. When you get positive or negative results, act quickly. Move a feature forward or delete it.
- Have a plan for documentation. I like to include product, release, training, and technical documentation in the sprint plan and align it to the roadmap. Once the documentation is done, a feature, sprint, or roadmap segment is complete. Represent documentation as a feature or in each feature.
- Features in discovery don’t belong on the roadmap. Given you should eliminate at least half of the features in discovery, don’t include them on the roadmap. Run tests, show prototypes, and narrow them down. That’s the point of discovery. Only move features to the backlog when discovery is complete and to the roadmap when you know the business value.
- Absolutely no handoffs. Roadmaps are a team sport. Roadmaps don’t come together in isolation. Don’t reveal your roadmap to design and engineering in a meeting — an example of an unnecessary ‘handoff’. Instead, design and engineering should contribute to the roadmap as it comes together. Each handoff leads to potential drift from the intended value and outcome on the roadmap. If you need to bring a team up to speed or hand something off, you are doing it wrong.
- Transparency. Everyone on the team, from the most junior engineer to the most senior product manager, should see experience the story and all the details as they develop. Context is critical to successful development and execution — for more on this, here is a post to reference: Thinking Beyond The Product: How Understanding Context Transforms Product Development
- Never dictate through the roadmap. Just like roadmaps, product development is a team sport. And no team plays well when they are told what to do. Instead, it’s about how the team interacts, how plays come together, and in-the-moment decisions — dictating leads to dead ends and dead features.
- DELETE, DELETE, DELETE. Be ruthless. Clear out the old. If it’s never going to happen or has unclear value, archive it. Dead features are often left. Doing this is the same as letting a vine grow on your wall and never pruning it. It will have dead spots. It will overtake the wall. It will grow in unproductive directions.
AND FINALLY
- No product roadmap survives contact with reality — or everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth by stakeholders and customers. Keep your roadmap from getting stale mid-cycle. Test, learn, and iterate. Let your teammates, stakeholders, and customers know you hear and appreciate their feedback. You must stay in sync with the market and your customers as a product team. Product roadmaps require active management and effort. Don’t set it and forget it.
Your goal is for your roadmap to withstand the harsh realities of the market. Success requires a commitment to following the proverbial golden rules and active management.
For reference, here are a few posts on product roadmap development and management to check out.
- How Merging Purpose With Profit Redefines Product Roadmaps And Product Success
- The Essential Questions That Lead To A Powerful Roadmap
- Avoid Product Ground Hog Day — Unlocking Success When Crafting An Outcome-Driven Roadmap
- A Tale of Two Roadmaps — And Why You Can’t Succeed With Only One
Bringing it home
A roadmap is not a static plan. It’s a dynamic, living, breathing organism that evolves in response to its environment. Good hygiene will ensure it doesn’t die from lack of care and feeding — drifting further and further from health. As a GPS for a product, the roadmap must remain connected to a strong and dynamic signal. A signal that updates the map as you travel an unknown road.
