Best for
- Roadmaps that are date-commitments nobody believes by month two
- Communicating direction to customers without promising specifics
- Aligning the team on what 'later' actually means
What you give it
- Your priorities (a prioritisation pass feeds this well), your delivery reality, and who the roadmap is for
What you get back
- The draft on honest horizons: NOW (committed, specific), NEXT (planned, directional), LATER (explored, thematic) — precision decaying with distance on purpose
- Outcome framing throughout: what gets better for whom, with features as evidence — so changing the how does not break the promise
- Audience versions from one truth: the internal one with the hard edges, the customer one without the ammunition — never disagreeing
How it works
- Builds on horizon honesty: commitment-precision only where commitment exists — NOW is specific, NEXT is directional, LATER is thematic, and the decay is the design.
- Frames by outcome: what improves for whom — features appear as current-best evidence of the theme, replaceable when learning says so without breaking the roadmap's word.
- Derives from the prioritisation and the capacity reality: a roadmap floating free of delivery math is fiction with a timeline.
- Maintains one truth with audience exposures: the internal and external versions differ in detail and candour, never in direction — the contradiction is where credibility dies.
Example
You: Draft our roadmap for the customer advisory board and the team, from this prioritised backlog.
Result: The draft: NOW holds the three committed items with their specifics (they are in build; the dates are real), NEXT holds two themes framed as outcomes ('getting reports into your hands faster' — the three candidate features listed as how-we-might, explicitly subject to learning), LATER holds the two directional bets as questions being explored. The customer version drops effort numbers and the competitive-sensitive item but contradicts nothing (one truth, two exposures). The advisory board heard direction without extracting date-promises; the team's version carries the same horizons with the hard edges (the cut list, the capacity math) attached. Month three: one NEXT theme's 'how' changed completely — and the roadmap's promise held, because the promise was the outcome.
Limits — please read
- Sales will still ask for dates; the roadmap gives them outcome language and the NOW horizon — the discipline of not promising NEXT is organisational, and the draft arms it.
- A roadmap is a communication of strategy, not its source; strategy gaps show through and get named.
- It ages by design: the refresh cadence (and what moves between horizons) is part of the deliverable.