Dilemma of Roadmaps

I’ve been reading a book about roadmapping, and today on a customer call we heard a need for something we had just de-scoped from the next release. 🤔 While we shouldn’t base our roadmap solely on frecency, a shorter cycle-time would let us respond to customers / the market sooner.

David Cancel (serial entrepreneur) on roadmaps:

Either I’m going to disappoint you by giving you exactly what we thought six months ahead of time was the best solution when it’s not, or by changing course and having lied to you.

How Far Out Should Your Roadmap Go?

The faster the pace of change in your market, the faster your development cycle should be—and the more compressed your roadmap should be in terms of both total timespan and the intervals you choose. While an established product in a mature market that releases new and improved versions once per year will have a correspondingly long roadmap, a startup (🎉) that is releasing new capabilities every week will have a roadmap that may stretch only a few months into the future.

(…or shorter)