Nearsighted roadmaps ftw

As I'm drafting up a new product roadmap right now, I've come to again appreciate the beauty of the idea of the nearsighted roadmap for B2B products.

All roadmaps suck!

Because they always focus on estimating, and we humans are terrible at estimation.

So what do you do? You could work with a big ass vision and only plan out the next couple of weeks in detail.

But then, what do you tell customers? B2B customers must have certainty! You can’t tell them, “We’ll ship this essential feature for you sometime in the future.”

That’s where the idea of the nearsighted roadmap enters the picture. The idea is simple: Things right in front of you are clear, while things further in the distance become larger blobs.

I’ve been using nearsighted roadmaps for quite some time, and I love them. Check that concept out if you feel the same pain:

• Rob (the now CEO of Remote.com) put it excellently here: https://medium.com/@jobv/the-nearsighted-roadmap-57fa57b5906a
  

• And I’ve covered a few examples some time back: https://medium.com/geekculture/4-excellent-examples-of-agile-nearsighted-roadmaps-ffec9cf6de5e