Lessons from the Workshop
The roadmap is a story, not a schedule.
Founders keep rebuilding the roadmap as a calendar and keep being surprised when reality refuses to obey it.
By Michael O'Callaghan ·
Almost every roadmap I'm shown is a schedule wearing a strategy costume. Quarters, swimlanes, dependencies. It looks like control.
The problem is that a schedule can only be wrong. The moment one date slips, the whole artefact loses authority, and the team quietly stops believing in it while still being measured against it.
A roadmap that works is a story: here is what we believe, here is what we'll do to test it, here is what would change our minds. Sequence matters. Precision of date does not.
When I ask a team to tell me the story of their roadmap and they can only read me the dates, that's the finding. Nobody has agreed on the plot.