Adam Gonnerman

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” - Michael Porter It's a familiar event to anyone who has worked with a tech team. You have work well along on a project when a stakeholder comes along asking for "just one more feature." If you are the project manager or product manager, people will look to you for guidance. You know that capacity is full, tradeoffs are real, the roadmap will bend, and something inevitably will break. Yet, the pressure is subtle (or non-so-subtle, depending on the stakeholder). There's an expectation, perhaps, that you'll say that the team can make it work, suggest that all are aligned, and acknowledge that this is an important feature. So, you say "yes." Six weeks or less later, you find that delivery slips, quality drops, morale dips, and trust is now eroded. Leadership is not only about what you drive forward. It’s about what you refuse to absorb. We need to be clear that saying "no" is not obstruction....

There we were, on a Zoom call, sharing our quarterly roadmap with leadership. The visuals were clean with dates, themes, milestones, and color coding. I think it's safe to say that the emotional effect of such a roadmap is a sense of alignment, clarity, and reduced anxiety. That's where there may be a problem. Roadmaps create psychological safety, but that safety can become an illusion of control.  Visual order reduces anxiety. We humans are social beings, and stories are core to our way of thinking about life. We prefer structured narratives over ambiguity. A roadmap, high level though it may be compared to a detailed project plan, turns uncertainty into a sequence. Having dates implies predictability, and sequencing implies causality.  Executives, for their part, want forward visibility. They want to see into the near- and mid-term future to the extent possible. Sales wants commitments that can be communicated and kept. Finance wants forecasting. Engineers look at the roadma...