Do you have a roadmap?

I looked back to my last 4 years building Veertly and my recent months building several bootstrapped projects and recorded a podcast with my thoughts on Roadmaps.

Roadmaps are important for:

• Your team → creates alignment
• Your customers → give them clarity on the long-term
• Your investors → build trust with them (this is for non-bootstrapped companies)

However, creating roadmaps can be dangerous:

• Reduces your flexibility to handle unpredictability
• Can create frustration for your team and customers if the plan is not realistic
• Loss of time in planning sessions

My recommendations around roadmaps

• Be lean and quick → do it to the bare minimum
• Take it as a guideline, not the source of truth
• Create space for unpredictability and changes → Be humble and adjust it regularly

90% of what you define there will not be the reality, so do not over-engineer!

Don’t spend much time with roadmaps, but don’t ignore them either. This is valid for both VC startups but also bootstrapped ones.

For my recent projects, I ignored completely roadmaps and vision.

I am focusing more on micro-SaaS, usually with only one feature, but that feature can be broken up into smaller ones and create a real MVP with possible extensions afterward. I have them in my mind, but it’s not the same as if it was explicitly in a document.

In terms of format for roadmaps, I tried many: slides with nice paths, just bullet points, Gantt charts, you name it… But at the end of the day, a simple nested bullet list is the best!