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Keep Your Roadmap Out of the Weeds and In the Mind of Your Team
Your roadmap has too much detail
As a project leader that works closely with product teams on a daily basis, the one tool that everyone needs and obsesses over is the product roadmap.
It’s your mechanism for getting alignment on your team and across your company. It communicates intent. It communicates priority. It’s the foundation for connecting your strategy with reality.
Roadmapping is a funny thing. They are kind of like belly buttons. Everyone has one, but if you look too close you are likely to find some “yunt ya”. That’s southern for dirt in dark places.
I’ve seen my fair share of them. Everything from post-it notes on a wall, to sophisticated spreadsheets embedded in wikis, to name your favorite roadmapping tool on the market.
None of them are perfect, but all of them are subject to the same core problems. I’m just going to focus on one of them today.
The Devil is Not Here
Roadmaps make teams debate silly things. One of those silly things is language. I’ve seen teams talk ad nauseam about the etymology of a word on a piece of paper.
Don’t get me wrong, words mean things and shared understanding is really important…
