Insights
Most company roadmaps are works of fiction
Too many priorities, nothing shipping, missed commitments. The problem usually isn't the team — it's that nothing credible connects strategy to engineering.
Philip Barber ·
A colleague of mine says it better than I can: most company roadmaps are works of fiction. Ours change behavior.
Here’s what the fiction sounds like inside a company. “Product and engineering are not aligned.” “Too many priorities and nothing is shipping.” “Teams aren’t meeting their commitments.” “Leadership doesn’t trust the data.” If any of those sound like your Monday meeting, this post is for you, because those are verbatim quotes from clients describing the month before we showed up.
The instinct is to blame the team. Sometimes that’s right. Usually it isn’t. What’s actually broken is the bridge between the top of the company and the bottom. Leadership has a vision, engineering has effort, and in between sits a roadmap nobody believes: dates picked to end arguments, priorities that change with whoever spoke to the CEO last, and commitments made without the people who have to keep them.
A roadmap like that isn’t a plan. It’s a peace treaty. And like most peace treaties signed under pressure, everyone violates it quietly and immediately.
What alignment actually means
Alignment is one of those words that’s been worn smooth by overuse, so let me be concrete about what we mean.
It means the business strategy, the product roadmap, and the engineering work are the same story told at three altitudes. The CEO can say where the company is going. The roadmap shows what gets built to get there, in what order, with real tradeoffs named. The engineering team’s current sprint visibly serves the top of that list. Pull any thread and it connects.
Most mid-market companies fail the thread test. The strategy lives in a deck, the roadmap lives in a tool, and the sprint lives in whatever was urgent two weeks ago. The gap between them is where speed, money, and credibility quietly hemorrhage.
Why this is hard to fix from inside
Honest answer: the fix requires saying no, in public, with authority, to people who outrank the roadmap.
When everything is priority one, choosing an actual priority one means telling a senior person their thing waits. Internal staff rarely have the standing to do that. The CEO technically does, but the CEO is often the source of half the priority churn. So companies live with the fiction because the fiction keeps the peace.
This is most of what we do when we embed a product or technology leader in a company. Not the ceremony of roadmapping, the spine of it. Force the real priority conversation. Write down the tradeoffs. Make commitments the team helped size, then defend the list when it gets attacked, which it will, usually within the month.
The test
Ask three people in your company what the top priority is right now: one executive, one product person, one engineer. If you get three answers, your roadmap is fiction, whatever the tool says.
The good news is that this is fixable, and faster than most people expect. A roadmap people believe changes how the organization behaves within a quarter. Things ship. Commitments mean something. The Monday meeting gets shorter.
That’s not magic. It’s just the difference between a document and an agreement. The companies that struggle most here are usually the ones making technology decisions without anyone qualified to check them — fix the seat first and the roadmap follows. We’ve watched it work: Podium went from vendor frustration to filed patents on the strength of exactly this discipline.