Chapter 10. Keeping It Fresh
What you’ll learn in this chapter
How the roadmap evolves
How far out your roadmap should go
Ways to manage planned change
Ways to manage unplanned change
How to communicate change
When conditions in the environment change, your roadmap—like any living thing—must change as well in order to survive.
How would your stakeholders feel if you built what you thought was important nine months ago instead of what is clearly important now?
But wait—your closest competitor just came out with something that’s eating into your close rate. And one of your largest customers just announced they won’t renew without a feature you ended up cutting. Not only that, but your team tells you that what you had planned for February is going to take until May to deliver.
If only the world would hold still long enough, we could get to the end of our roadmaps, achieve our visions of success, and retire rich and happy. But it never works that way. As we mentioned in Chapter 6, things change, and the closer your product is to the cutting edge, the faster they change. So what do you do?
When conditions in the environment change, your roadmap—like any living thing—must change as well in order to survive. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the frequency of change, how to manage it, and how to communicate it.
Roadmap Evolution
Imagine a species of small birds living on the mainland of South America. That species feeds on small, soft seeds common on the continent, and has evolved a small beak that is ...
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