Negative Roadmaps for Startups

Last week, I was catching up with an entrepreneur who shared a concept with me that I hadn’t heard before: negative roadmaps. In the startup world, a product roadmap outlines the features and functionality expected over the next few quarters or years. The idea with a traditional roadmap is to set a vision and direction for the product. By doing so, it helps sell to potential prospects what’s coming down the pipeline, share with existing customers where you’re going from a technology point of view, and align the internal team around priorities for engineering and product development.

Of course, entrepreneurs are an optimistic bunch and often want to be helpful to as many people as possible, which can lead to broad roadmaps or products that are overly expansive. One of my early lessons, learned many years ago, was specifically around this issue. We had a successful product, and we were growing nicely, but I fell into the trap of trying to be all things to all customers, both current and future. After building out a bunch of features and seeing that they weren’t being used much, I still tried to continually enhance the product. However, this only slowed down development because more code, technical debt, documentation, and training were required.

I realized that from a roadmap perspective and in feature development, it’s incredibly important to have an opinionated vision of where you’re headed. That opinionated vision from a product point of view doesn’t necessarily include all the existing customers you have today. The customers you want to have tomorrow may vary slightly or could be at the high or low end of the market. The idea is that the roadmap and the opinionated vision of the future should reflect what you want to have, not necessarily what you have today—although they could be one and the same.

The idea I learned about last week is that a negative roadmap. A negative roadmap tells you what you’re not going to do in the future. For example, it might outline feature requests we’ve received over the years that we’re not going to implement, modules customers have asked for that we are not going to build, or types of functionality that competitors offer but don’t align with our ideal customer profile, so we won’t implement them.

This idea of a negative roadmap is complementary to the normal roadmap. It’s a way to document things that are not going to happen in the product or things that are going to be removed from the product. Roadmaps are critically important, and as organizations grow, getting everyone on the same page becomes harder. Adding a negative roadmap to the mix is another exercise in aligning the team around what is not going to happen. Entrepreneurs should consider adding a negative roadmap to their collection of documents and best practices that they use to run their startup.