Building better roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad)

You should still be separating your hard launch from your soft launch. So what you should be doing is basically saying your developers are able to launch something on a particular date and it's the date that's convenient for them.

There's nothing worse than the marketers trying to market something based on pictures from the designers that have vastly changed by the time they go out or that they don't know whether it's going to come out on the right day or not.

The further out you plan, the more you're making it up. We know this.

The whole point about a roadmap is that it's not designed to be your plan. I think about it as being a prototype for your strategy.

The value isn't in your roadmap, the value is in the roadmapping process. What you're actually doing is laying out your assumptions of the problems that you're solving.

The problem with the timeline is that as soon as you have a timeline, it turns it into a math chart sort of thing, where you've got time on the X axis and things to do on the Y axis and you basically end up with everything underneath is assigned a due date or a iteration.

Product people are the only ones who seem to be pinned down to be required to give concrete dates as to when things are going to be delivered in this way. Your sales team isn't asked to give exact delivery dates on their work.