8. Roadmap

§The question: what do we build to get there?

§This is the level everyone wants to start at, and the ladder has spent four chapters making sure you do not. A roadmap written first is a list of features someone liked. A roadmap written here is a list of answers to the question above it: what would move this goal?

§ 8.1Ideas enter as questions#

§Every candidate item is written in one form: "Can we do X to move Y?" X is the thing you might build. Y is a goal from the previous chapter, which means Y has a bet above it, which means the item is traceable to the mission in four steps.

§"Can we let the guest build her profile in under a minute, with no login, to move profile completion past sixty percent?" That is a roadmap item. "Build a loyalty program" is not, because there is no Y, and a team that lets it onto the roadmap has just put a feature above the strategy.

§Teresa Torres's opportunity solution tree is the same idea drawn as a diagram: outcome at the top, opportunities beneath, solutions beneath those. The ladder's version is flatter because a startup has three to five goals and can hold the tree in a table.

§ 8.2Group, then choose#

§Ideas arrive in quantity, which is right. Group them into concepts, three to five action steps per concept, and then choose. Choosing needs a method, and the method matters less than the number of methods, which is one.

§RICE, from Intercom, scores reach, impact, confidence and effort and is honest about confidence, which most methods hide. MoSCoW, from the DSDM tradition, sorts into must, should, could and will not, and is fast. Impact against effort on a two-by-two is the simplest and works at five people. Pick one, use it for every item, and let the team argue about scores rather than about method. A team that runs three methods will find one that ranks its favorite first.

§ 8.3Horizons and promotion criteria#

§Place the chosen items on a board with horizons. Now, next, later is the common form and Janna Bastow's argument for it holds: dates on a startup roadmap are fiction and horizons are honest. The ladder's version uses time bands, one month, three, six, twelve, twenty-four, because the hospitality team needed to show a group leadership how the acts connected, but the principle is the same. Vince Law puts the same caution more bluntly: a roadmap is defunct as soon as it is published, because the moment it meets new evidence it is already wrong in a detail. Horizons and promotion criteria are how a roadmap survives that: the strategy above it holds, and the items below it move as the evidence moves, without the whole plan being rewritten.

§What makes the board a roadmap rather than a wish list is the promotion criterion at each jump: what has to be true for an item to move from later to next, and from next to now. "Payments moves to next when unaided check-in reaches five of six." "The operation's write access moves to next when the pilot restaurant's servers open the card on half of shifts." The criterion is the goal from the previous chapter, restated as a gate.

§Ryan Singer's Shape Up adds the missing piece: appetite. For each item in now, how much time is the team willing to spend, stated before the work begins, so that the work is shaped to the time rather than the time to the work.

§ 8.4Deferred is not discarded#

§The later column is where good ideas wait. Payments was pain number one in the hospitality room and it went to later, with its criterion written, because the bet it depended on had not held. That is not a rejection. It is a sequence, and the difference matters to the people who argued for it: an idea in later with a criterion is a promise that it will be reconsidered when a specific thing becomes true. An idea that vanishes is a fight postponed.

§ 8.5What comes out#

§A board with horizons, a promotion criterion at each jump, and every item in the form "can we do X to move Y." The one-month column is the next chapter.