Roadmaps as Root Cause

From Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (2nd ed., Wiley, 2017), Chapter 22, “The Problems with Product Roadmaps.” The line is a shaded callout on the chapter’s opening page, set between Cagan’s definition of a roadmap and the section listing management’s reasons for wanting one.

Cagan defines a roadmap as a prioritized list of features and projects your team has been asked to work on. The chapter’s argument is that the items on the list are the problem: management is paying for business results, but the roadmap commits the team to output. Sharper prioritization cannot fix a document whose job is to schedule the wrong thing.

Several other quotes on this site make the same diagnosis. Fried and Heinemeier Hansson’s Planning is guessing compresses Cagan’s claim into a slogan. Steve Blank says the same thing at the startup level: no business plan survives first contact with customers. Bill Campbell once threatened to throw out anyone at Intuit who told engineers which features to build. Cagan’s other quote on this site, on the trap of believing we can anticipate customer response, names the underlying mechanism.