Turns product strategy into a themed Now/Next/Later roadmap with explicit trade-offs, confidence levels, and no committed dates beyond one quarter. Use when someone asks "build our product roadmap", "turn these priorities into a roadmap", "execs want committed ship dates for next year", or needs to communicate direction without over-promising. Do NOT use for company-wide annual operating plans - use annual-plan instead; for defining the goals a roadmap serves, use okr-builder; for scheduling work inside a sprint, use sprint-planning.
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name: Product Roadmap
description: Turns product strategy into a themed Now/Next/Later roadmap with explicit trade-offs, confidence levels, and no committed dates beyond one quarter. Use when someone asks "build our product roadmap", "turn these priorities into a roadmap", "execs want committed ship dates for next year", or needs to communicate direction without over-promising. Do NOT use for company-wide annual operating plans - use annual-plan instead; for defining the goals a roadmap serves, use okr-builder; for scheduling work inside a sprint, use sprint-planning.
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# Product Roadmap
A roadmap is a communication tool, not a promise to ship a feature list on fixed dates. The costly failure it prevents is double-sided: a Gantt chart of dated features sets the team up to publicly "miss the roadmap" within two months, while a roadmap with no trade-offs is a wishlist that aligns nobody. This skill builds one that aligns the organization around outcomes and survives contact with reality.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Gather inputs and anchor to strategy
Collect before building; where an input is missing, that is upstream work, not a blank to improvise:
- Vision - where the product is going in 1-3 years.
- Goals - the 2-4 outcomes for this period (growth, retention, expansion). More than 4 goals means no goals; send goal-setting itself to okr-builder.
- Target users and problems - who is served and what pain is being solved.
- The candidate list: everything currently being considered, with rough effort and any evidence of value.
Every roadmap item must trace back to a goal. An item that traces to no goal gets questioned, and either a goal is missing or the item is.
### Step 2: Organize by themes, not features
Group work into themes - problem areas and outcomes, such as "Reduce onboarding friction", never "Build feature X". Themes survive when specific solutions change, communicate intent without over-promising implementation, and leave teams free to find the best solution inside the theme. If a theme name contains a solution noun (a screen, an integration, a widget), rewrite it as the problem it solves.… load the full skill through Skill Me