Article

The Public Roadmap: Why You Need One, and How to Create It

Megan Saker · ProdPad Free Intermediate

A practical how to for the mechanics once you have decided to share: what to include, what to hold back, and how to keep it honest. It is the operational companion to the more philosophical essays. Use it as a checklist when you actually build the thing. It is explicit about setting expectations without dates.

  • Publish direction and status, keep sensitive or uncertain bets private
  • A public roadmap needs an owner and a refresh habit or it rots into a broken promise
  • Frame items so a change of plan reads as learning, not failure
Open on prodpad.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. Should I share a public roadmap with my early users, or does that just create pressure and expectations I cannot meet?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. Basecamp's battle-tested, opinionated system for shipping meaningful work in fixed cycles without endless backlogs, a primary... Basecamp / 37signals Book · free online book Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters Ryan Singer
  3. Arvid Kahl built and sold a company on radical transparency, sharing his real revenue numbers publicly, so this is not a... The Bootstrapped Founder Essay · ~10 min read The Increasing Risk of Building in Public Arvid Kahl
  4. This is the tool most teams reach for when they want a public roadmap that customers can actually vote on, not just a static... canny.io Tool Canny: Public Roadmap Canny
  5. This is the direct answer to the pressure problem in the question: if a public roadmap scares you because of dates you cannot... prodpad.com Article Why I Invented the Now-Next-Later Roadmap Janna Bastow
  6. This tackles the exact question head-on: should you expose the roadmap at all, and what do you actually risk. It is honest... canny.io Essay Should You Have a Public Product Roadmap? Eric Hoppe
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →