Building stuff based on visions and roadmaps is like building a house on sand. Last month's "critical priority" becomes this month's technical debt. Your team is building, rebuilding, then building again – burning cash and momentum on the same problems, and putting off other vital work until you know more.
Each time you think you've got it all figured out, the sands shift again.
Here’s the thing: your product vision and roadmap aren’t ever going to become stable. They can’t. The market evolves, technology advances, and your understanding shifts.
If you focus on features, roadmap, vision, you’ll only ever find shifting sands.
So what are you supposed to anchor decisions on? Your team — engineers, designers, product managers, everyone — they need something to stay stable. Without it, they're either paralysed waiting for the vision to crystallise, or it’s just headless chickens, right?
Step AWAY from the crenellated bucket
The good news is that you aren’t doomed to a foundation of eternal collapse. You can find the stability you need in your user’s context.
Why? Because the user’s context — their goals, their challenges, their biology, their domain — evolves far more slowly than technology or features.
Their context is messy, yes. Complex? Abso-freaking-lutely! But it’s also stable in ways your product roadmap never can be.
So stop thinking in features, and zoom out to the context in which those features are used.
The stickiness of ice cream and the saltiness of the sea
What's true about your customer's world?
What’s unlikely to change, no matter how much the tech or market shifts?
Here's what won't work ... "pain points" or "tech trends". That’s just more sand.
No, you need a quick, lightweight way to distinguish what's actually stable in your user's world from what just feels stable because it's familiar.
For example, instead of "build a dashboard", start with "how real operations managers go about spotting problems before they cascade".
Any dashboard requirements you can think of today will be outdated tomorrow. But the way humans detect and respond to early warning signals? That changes slowly. (You'll be surprised by the details, and you'll almost certainly find out nobody even needed that dashboard they asked for.)
This shift in focus — from what you're building to the context it's used in — is what separates the teams that are stuck constantly rebuilding from the teams that build once and iterate intelligently.
Weaving strands into a deckchair
You need to build a shared model that weaves together three things: your system architecture, your customers' context, and your organisation's aspirations.
This model acts as a stable foundation for your product – staying solid while the minutiae of features and priorities change shape. A deckchair on which you can sit comfortably and confidently while the shifting sand tickles your toes.
You won't nail the model on your first try. But each iteration gets more stable, and unlike doing more roadmap planning, each iteration also involves delivery. Glory be!
This is how you escape the rebuild trap and start making real progress. Teams will no longer mistake the desirable evolution of their knowledge for “scope creep”. And progress will no longer come at the cost of rushing into early decisions that paint you into a nasty corner later on.
The goal of this model isn’t to predict the future. It’s to enable you to adapt to whatever the future brings. Like moving a deckchair a few centimetres into the shade.
Once you've got that shared model, your teams will love it. Alignment takes care of itself, decisions get clearer, doing the right work takes less effort, velocity increases. You can communicate direction and priorities, promise dates, coordinate between teams. Even your vision and your roadmaps become more reliable. And you won't be badgered for requirements: those are woven into the fabric.
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We're Crown & Reach, the people who figure out why good products are failing. We help CEOs of profitable-but-precarious companies figure out why things aren't working as they want – despite doing everything 'right'.
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