The case for a smaller, sharper roadmap.

Product strategy · 05.04.2025 · 6 min read

Most product roadmaps are built to satisfy too many stakeholders. They contain the features the sales team has promised, the capabilities the engineering team wants to build, the metrics the board is tracking, and the ideas that came out of the last all-hands. The result is a document that makes everyone feel heard and tells no one what to actually prioritise.

A roadmap should be an argument, not an inventory. It should take a position on what the product needs to become next — and by implication, what it is not going to become. That requires someone to make a call, which is why genuinely opinionated roadmaps are rare.

The discipline of narrowing a roadmap is the discipline of understanding your user deeply enough to know what they need before they can articulate it. It is easy to fill a backlog with requested features. It is hard to say: these three things will change how users experience this product in ways that matter, and everything else will wait.

"A roadmap that contains everything is a roadmap that commits to nothing."

Short, focused roadmaps also create better engineering. When the scope is clear, engineers can make architectural decisions that support the direction rather than hedge against all possibilities. Technical debt often originates not from poor engineering but from a product team that could not decide what it was building.

Try making your roadmap two quarters shorter than it currently is. Remove everything you are not prepared to defend in a room with your users. What remains is probably the product you should be building.