Why Roadmaps Fail
And how to make them succeed
If you work in a product team, chances are you have had something like the following experience. Your leadership regularly hands down the itemized list of features they want you to build over the next year or quarter. These features range from customer wants and sales commitments, to things that the leadership and other stakeholders think the product needs to do. They ask you to estimate and prioritize each of the features and put them on the product roadmap. Your product managers go away and do some research and write detailed specs for each of the features. Product design comes up with beautiful designs and mockups for how the features will look. The product delivery team then tries to break it down into estimates, maybe using story points, maybe using t-shirt sizes to try and work out the relative effort. The engineers are then asked to put a deadline on how long it will take. When they hand over the estimates, they are accused of padding the schedule — it can’t possibly take that long. So with some compromise and fiddling with numbers, the product roadmap is finalized. It lists each of the features, maybe with screen mockups and the timelines in which you plan to deliver them. sales gets excited and starts talking to prospects about the new features coming, and product marketing puts it in a pretty graphic and puts it on your website.
