Tracking Real Startup Progress on a Product Roadmap

Make sure your effort is balanced and your destination is clear

It’s impossible to know how far away your destination is if you don’t know how far you’ve already come.

This is the true purpose of the product roadmap. It’s not about impressing investors. It’s not about delighting customers. It’s not about motivating employees. Sure, it can be all of those things, but if you’re building your product toward any one of those purposes, you’ll probably fail at all of them.

I know. I’ve done it.

In more than 20 years of building high-growth startups, across various industries and at all levels of technical complexity, I’ve learned that one of the more difficult parts of the growth phase is pulling the signal out of the noise, confidence out of chaos and real progress out of perceived progress.

A common tool used across those challenges is a product roadmap, which is a list of features documented out from now to near to far. It’s often a misunderstood document, treated like a homework assignment that has to be tackled before the real work gets done.

I totally get that. I’m a maker and a doer at heart, but I’ve learned the hard way that making and doing without direction is essentially play time…