Practical Tips for Roadmaps That Lead Somewhere

If you’re working on your product roadmap, use these tips to make the roadmap useful.

Fill the roadmap mainly with outcomes (effects, results, changes that advance the product strategy), not stuff (deliverables or features).
Include internal improvements, and connect each one to a business outcome. That’s how you protect them from the inevitable “We also need you to do X.” Tech debt repayment, process fixes, and skill-building matter for your continued ability to deliver customer outcomes.
Balance outcomes with realities. Some work is mandatory: compliance, partner updates, security, vendor deprecations. Call these out so expectations stay grounded.
Make the roadmap shorter than usual, and plan to adjust it more often. The farther out you commit, the harder and more wasteful it is to plan accurately. You’ll face more unplanned customer-facing work, and you’ll have less time and appetite for internal improvements.
Break big outcomes into an evolutionary sequence of smaller ones, such as using the “earliest testable → usable → lovable” progression. This helps you avoid feature-heavy roadmaps and gives stakeholders clearer checkpoints.
Mix directional outcomes with the fewest time-bound commitments. An example: “Outcome A by mid-year; B and C depend on what we learn from A.”

As you discuss needs and wants with stakeholders, help them see why this approach delivers more value and avoids the cost of building the wrong things on fixed timelines.