For years, we maintained a roadmap.
It lived in a spreadsheet, then a wiki, then a dedicated tool that cost more than it should have. Every quarter, we'd update it. Every month, we'd reference it. Every week, we'd ignore it.
The roadmap was never accurate. Not because we were bad at planning — we were fine at planning — but because the world kept changing faster than the document.
A customer would mention something in passing. A competitor would ship something unexpected. Someone on the team would have an idea in the shower. And suddenly, the thing we'd planned to do in Q3 didn't make sense anymore.
We'd update the roadmap, of course. But by the time we did, it was already wrong again.
At some point, we stopped updating it. Not officially. We just… forgot. And nothing bad happened.
What replaced it wasn't a new system. It was something harder to describe.
We started paying attention to a feeling. A shared sense of what mattered right now. Not next quarter, not next year. Right now.
It sounds vague, and it was. But it was also surprisingly effective.
When someone asked what we were working on, we could answer immediately. Not because we'd memorised a document, but because we actually knew. The work was connected to something we cared about, not something we'd committed to six months ago.
When priorities shifted, we didn't need a meeting to realign. The shift was already happening in conversations, in pull requests, in the questions people were asking.
This only worked because the team was small and trusted each other. I'm not sure it scales. I'm not sure it's supposed to.
But I've started to wonder if roadmaps exist less for coordination and more for comfort. They give the illusion of control. They let you point at something and say, "See? We have a plan."
The problem is that plans are only useful if you're willing to abandon them. And if you're willing to abandon them, you have to ask what they were for in the first place.
Maybe the answer is: they were for the people who weren't in the room. The stakeholders, the investors, the new hires who needed context. The roadmap was never for us. It was for everyone else.
Once we realised that, we could be honest about it. We kept a version for external consumption — a rough sketch of direction, not a promise. And internally, we trusted the feeling.
It's not a process. It's not repeatable. But it worked better than anything we'd tried before.