Sit down. Let me tell you about the first roadmap I ever wrote. Twelve months, colour-coded, every feature pinned to a week. Beautiful.

Sales loved it, because they could show it to customers. By month three it was fiction. By month five it was a liability: a large client had signed on the strength of something scheduled for August that we had quietly abandoned in April.

A roadmap looks like a plan, but customers, colleagues and investors read it as a promise. So let us build one that can bear that weight, starting with what it is. A product roadmap is a shared, high-level picture of where a product or service is heading and why, showing which problems you will solve in roughly what order, without pretending to be a delivery schedule.

Notice what is missing from that sentence. Dates. Features. We will come to both, but they are not the point.

Why start a roadmap with the brand, not the backlog?

Most roadmaps begin with a list of things people have asked for. Customer requests, an engineer’s pet project, whatever the biggest client mentioned on the last call. Arrange those in order, add a timeline, done.

Wrong place to start. A roadmap is brand strategy made concrete, and it should be built from the strategy outwards. If your brand promises simplicity, a roadmap stuffed with power-user features is a slow betrayal of that promise. If you have positioned yourself as the specialist, every detour into adjacent markets dilutes the thing customers chose you for.

So before you open any planning tool, settle what your brand promises, who it is for, and what it will refuse to do. That last one matters most. Every item that later lands on the roadmap gets checked against it.

Safaricom in Kenya is the case I return to. M-Pesa began as a pilot in 2005 aimed at helping microfinance borrowers receive and repay loans by phone. The commercial launch in 2007 shifted the emphasis to transfers and payments, the broader use people clearly wanted.

Safaricom explains how it builds the next big M-Pesa feature: the roadmap still following what customers actually do.

Later additions followed the same thread. M-Shwari, launched in 2012 with a partner bank, added savings and small loans inside the same wallet; Fuliza, an overdraft facility, arrived in January 2019. Each step extended a single promise, money that moves safely through your phone, rather than scattering into unrelated ventures.

That is what a brand-led roadmap looks like from the outside. Coherent. Each release makes the last one more valuable, and no customer has to wonder what the company is for.

Step one: write the strategy on one page

You need a short document the whole team can recite. Mine always has five lines:

1. The customer we serve and the job they hire us for.
2. The brand promise in one sentence.
3. The two or three outcomes we want over the next year, expressed as changes for customers or the business, not as features.
4. What we will not do, even if asked.
5. How we will know we are succeeding.

Outcomes are the heart of it. Teams that roadmap well put the intended outcomes on the roadmap itself, build it with the people who will use it rather than presenting it to them, and do proper discovery before committing.

Feature lists fixed a year ahead are the habit that most often lets teams down, especially in fast-moving technical markets.

A fair warning: writing outcomes is harder than writing features. “Add a loyalty module” takes five seconds. “Get second-visit customers to return within thirty days” takes an argument. Have the argument.

Step two: choose a format (now, next, later is the honest default)

There are three broad formats, and you can blend them.

Timeline roadmaps put items against months or quarters. Good when you face hard external dates: a regulation coming into force, a trade show, a hardware manufacturing slot. Dangerous otherwise, because every bar on a calendar reads as a commitment.

Now, next, later roadmaps sort work into three columns by certainty rather than date. The format was popularised by Janna Bastow, co-founder of ProdPad and Mind the Product, as an alternative to rigid timelines.

“Now” is what the team is building and fairly sure of. “Next” is being shaped and researched. “Later” is direction, deliberately fuzzy. The further right you look, the less detail you should see.

Outcome or theme roadmaps group work under the outcomes from step one. “Faster onboarding” becomes a lane, and the items inside it can change as you learn.

My recommendation for most teams is now, next, later with outcome themes running across it. The columns tell people how confident you are. The themes tell them why.

Basecamp takes this further. In the Shape Up method written up by Ryan Singer, teams work in six-week cycles, followed by a two-week cool-down, and leaders decide at a “betting table” which shaped pitches to commit to for the next cycle only.

No long backlog of promises waiting to be broken. It is a strong cure for teams addicted to over-committing, though it suits small, senior teams better than large enterprises.

Step three: fill the columns from discovery, not from the loudest voice

Now you populate the board. Gather inputs from customer interviews, support tickets, sales conversations, usage data and competitor moves. Then filter them through the one-page strategy.

For every candidate item, ask:

• Which outcome does this serve?
• Does it strengthen or blur our brand promise?
• What evidence do we have that customers need it, beyond one person asking loudly?
• What is the smallest version that would tell us if we are right?

Items that fail the first two questions go in a “not now” list. Keep that list visible. It shows stakeholders their requests were heard, and it stops the same idea being re-litigated every month.

Picture a Bukit Timah tuition centre group planning its parent app. Parents ask for twenty things. The brand promise is “your child’s progress, made visible.” Lesson recordings, homework tracking and progress reports pass the test. A marketplace for second-hand textbooks, however popular in the survey, does not, and goes on the “not now” list with a polite note.

Step four: decide how far to show dates (and to whom)

Here is where my first roadmap went wrong, and where most go wrong.

Talk to anyone who has sat on either side of an enterprise deal and you hear the same complaint. Salespeople show buyers a roadmap that matches the buyer’s goals, and it turns out not to be the real or achievable one. Buyers who have been burned before demand to see the roadmap before they will talk business. Each side’s distrust feeds the other’s.

The fix is to run more than one view of the same roadmap:

The internal view can carry target quarters for “now” items, owners and dependencies.

The sales and partner view shows themes and the now column, with clear language that later items are direction rather than commitment.

The public view, if you have one, is the most careful of all.

GitHub runs one of the best-known public roadmaps, kept as a repository where each item carries a release phase (exploring, in design, preview, generally available) and sits under the quarter it is expected to ship next.

The repository states plainly that it is not a commitment or promise to deliver by any date, and that customers should not make purchasing decisions on it. That disclaimer is not legal throat-clearing. It is brand protection.

Step five: use the roadmap to tell a story (carefully)

A good roadmap can be a marketing asset, because it tells customers where you are heading and invites them along.

Tesla is the boldest example. In 2006 Elon Musk set out the company’s strategy publicly: start with an expensive, low-volume sports car, use the money to bring down costs, then make cheaper, higher-volume cars.

Roadster production began in 2008, the Model S reached customers in June 2012, and the Model 3 was first delivered in July 2017. Whatever you think of the company today, that public sequence gave the brand a narrative investors and early buyers could follow for a decade.

Xiaomi offers a more recent case from Asia. In March 2021 Lei Jun announced the company would enter electric vehicles and invest 10 billion yuan.

The SU7 saloon was unveiled at the end of 2023 and went on sale in Beijing on 28 March 2024; the YU7 SUV was revealed in May 2025. The roadmap was broad, the dates arrived, and a phone brand earned the right to be taken seriously as a carmaker.

Both show the upside. The downside is that a public roadmap with dates you miss teaches customers to discount everything you say.

Nintendo shows the disciplined alternative. It revealed the Switch 2 on 16 January 2025 with little more than a short video, gave full details in a Direct presentation on 2 April and launched on 5 June.

Big news, kept tight, released when the company was sure. For a brand built on delight, saying less until you can say it well is a roadmap choice in itself.

How often should you update a product roadmap?

Review the “now” column every two to four weeks as part of normal planning. Review “next” and “later” quarterly, against your outcomes. Rewrite the one-page strategy once a year, or when something big changes: a competitor move, a funding round, a new market.

Rhythm matters as much as content. Intel ran its chip development for years on what it called tick-tock, adopted in 2007: one cycle shrank the manufacturing process, the next introduced a new design on top of it. Customers and partners could plan around that cadence.

When it no longer fitted the physics, Intel replaced it in March 2016 with a three-step process, architecture and optimisation model. Even a famous rhythm should change when reality does. The mistake is changing it silently.

What happens when the roadmap and the brand pull apart?

They will, at some point. A big customer offers money for a feature that does not fit. A trend arrives and the board wants a piece of it.

Netflix is the cautionary tale. In September 2011, having started streaming in 2007, it announced it would split its DVD-by-mail business into a separate service called Qwikster. Customers revolted at the idea of managing two accounts and two names. Within weeks Netflix reversed the plan and kept DVDs under the Netflix name.

The roadmap logic, streaming is the future, was right. The brand execution, forcing customers to learn a new name for an old service, was not. Netflix eventually closed DVD-by-mail in September 2023, on its own schedule rather than in a rush.

When strategy and brand collide, slow down. Ask what the brand promised, who will feel the change, and if you are solving a customer problem or an internal one.

A simple checklist before you share

• Does every item map to a written outcome?
• Could a new hire explain why “now” items come before “next” ones?
• Have you removed dates you cannot defend?
• Is there a visible “not now” list?
• Does the public version, if any, carry a plain statement that it is not a promise?
• Is there a date for the next review?

Tick all six and share it. If you cannot, you are not ready, and that is fine. A late roadmap beats a misleading one.

Before you close the planning doc

What should a product roadmap include?
At minimum: the strategy or outcomes it serves, the main themes of work, a rough order of priority such as now, next and later, owners, and a clear note on how firm any dates are.

What is the difference between a product roadmap and a release plan?
A roadmap explains direction and priorities over months or years; a release plan schedules specific features and fixes for upcoming releases, usually over weeks.

Should a small business create a product roadmap?
Yes, even a one-page now, next, later board helps a small team say no to distractions and tell customers honestly what is coming.

If you would like help tying your roadmap to a brand strategy that holds together, talk to our brand strategy team.