A defendable roadmap
If you are a product company you need to have a product roadmap. Your business probably has a lot of passionate people who all have a view on things.
Platform will want to retire poor performing code.
Sales want the features competitors have.
Security will want to lock things down.
Customer Success will want to fix the bugs.
Finance want to reduce your cost to serve.
Engineering will want to rebuild to be more reliable.
Marketing want new things to market.
Legal will want to ensure you comply.
If you have no roadmap then what you have is a reactive product that is steered by everyone.
Instead have a roadmap that plans out how you want to deliver value and ideally when. It doesn’t have to be too far into the future either, or have dates. Just be clear on what you are doing now and next. You can’t do everything at once, but if you don’t have a plan and don’t defend it then everyone will try and do it all at once.
Your plan will always change, that’s the nature of both roadmaps and plans, but have A plan.
