In praise of opportunity roadmaps

Product roadmaps are a fact of life. They’re a good way to set strategy, and communicate progress.

But without care, they can become an albatross, burdening teams under the weight of hard deadlines and sprawling interdependencies.

But they don’t need to be. Sometimes you just need to know:

What’s happening now

What you think will happen next

What you’ve done

What you might do later

We recommend opportunity roadmaps to stay lean and adaptable. Here’s why we like them, and how we use them.

What a roadmap is, and why you need one

First, the basics. A product roadmap is a visual, strategic document that shows work that is happening now, and which might happen in future.

A good roadmap does two things. It helps the team prioritise what to do next. And it acts as a tool for transparent communication: it helps teams and stakeholders understand the status of the project, and its direction of travel.

There are many kinds of roadmap, which fall on a spectrum from lightweight to heavy-duty. At the latter end are the traditional roadmaps. These typically set out a linear plan, far into the future, mapping timelines and dependencies. They may also include KPIs.

At the other end, the case is sometimes made that you don’t need a roadmap at all. The rationale tends to be that good ideas always come back round, and next priority will always be clear.

Having no roadmap might work for single-product startups, it’s unlikely to fly in most organisations — with good reason. It’s perfectly reasonable that stakeholders in larger organisations keep tabs on what’s happening now and next — especially those ultimately responsible for the success of the project, who need to report on progress to higher-ups.

Much like our thinking behind why we use Kanban, not Scrum, we advocate for lightweight roadmaps. They maintain flexibility, which avoids locking the team into the wrong priorities. But they still communicate the strategy, reassuring everyone that the team isn’t flying blind.

The opportunity roadmap

We use something more adaptive — an opportunity roadmap. It sits somewhere between the just-in-time delivery of Kanban and the visibility of Scrum and waterfall roadmaps.

This kind of roadmap doesn’t make hard commitments. It doesn’t claim to know everything up front. It’s there to show:

What we’re working on now

What we could start work on next

Everything we could attempt given sufficient time and resources

It’s designed to evolve, not predict. We review it every couple of weeks. We might:

Reorder the upcoming milestones based on new information or changes to team capacity

Start working towards new milestones — if they still look like the right opportunities

Avoid artificial certainty

A common pitfall in roadmapping happens when your roadmap instils a false sense of certainty rather than acting as a guide to strategic direction.

Emil Kabisch’s Escaping the roadmap trap explains this well. Traditional roadmaps are often confused with project plans. They prioritise deliverables over discovery, create pressure to maintain arbitrary timelines, and encourage teams to treat strategic planning as a one-off activity. As a result, traditional roadmaps can be quite scary. Teams can feel set up to fail.

They’re also prone to being misread. A linear roadmap suggests the path is fixed — that all the research and learning is already done. Reality is never that neat. Product discovery is continuous. Priorities shift. Plans change. And these are good things — they keep your project on course. An opportunity roadmap allows for this.

Prioritise and communicate

Per Kabisch, our approach is a blend of opportunity tree and Kanban roadmap.

Like the opportunity tree, it encourages teams to regularly pause, reflect and choose the best next move rather than blindly following a fixed plan. Like Kanban, it separates the strategic priority we’re actively working (Now) from those we’re reasonably confident about (Next) and those we have tentatively in mind (Later).

That separation matters. It avoids the common trap of compiling an organisational wish list and calling it a strategy. If something’s in the Later column, it needs a plausible chance of being picked up in future. It’s not a holding pen for all the things.

Opportunity roadmaps don’t guarantee perfect prioritisation. But they make the conversation clearer and more honest for teams and stakeholders alike.

They work particularly well as part of our engagement check-ins. Kanban is optimised for delivery, but it can make it trickier for stakeholders to keep tabs on where things are heading. A shared roadmap closes this gap. It gives everyone a touchpoint to discuss priorities, risks and potential shifts in direction.

In summary, then

The opportunity roadmap doesn’t try to do everything. But it does give you a clear, adaptable way to ask the right questions — and a platform to work through them to identify the best next move.

They’re an example of the lightweight, flexible systems and processes that, in our experience, make it easier to get things done, done well, and almost entirely albatross-free.