Many stakeholders are looking to the roadmap to tell them exactly what they can expect and when. However, that type of artifact is not a roadmap — it’s a project or release plan.
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Michael Salerno was VP of Product at Brainshark when he described this difference to me: “A roadmap is not a release plan. A roadmap is a sequence of stakeholder priorities and requires concept feasibility for delivery. A release plan requires rigorous scope definition and engineering capacity planning.”
It is an art to train your stakeholders to understand this difference, but here are a few hints:
If everything has a date, it’s probably a release plan
If every roadmap item is a feature, not a need or a problem or a job to done, it’s probably a release plan
If there is no vision or mission the roadmap is leading toward, it’s probably a release plan
If you can’t tell the roadmap as a story with a hero/ine, an obstacle, and a promised land…
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