For most businesses, the product roadmap is a feature release plan to be delivered over time. The focus is usually on what we are doing and when. The feature treadmill if you will where we are working to complete the tasks listed in front of us.
But there is another way to look at the product roadmap and it's one that can help us approach the entire planning and executing phase with a more humane view of our efforts.
So let's start by defining what we mean by strategy and how it relates up the food chain:
A product roadmap represents a the future state and maps back to our strategy.
The roadmap is there to help us hit our objective in a series of sequenced steps.
It's a vision of where we need to get as per our strategy. By bringing the vision to life, we usually end up fixing problems and thus we end up in a better place.
As you go along completing the work, you need to come up for air every now and then so we can check metrics to see if we are there yet or not.
Constraints are a part of any strategy because we need to determine precisely **what we are not doing.** We cannot do everything and so constraints help us focus on what we think matters right now.
One way to spot a good strategy is to think about applying our "strengths" to an area of "opportunity" -- using the skills and expertise at our disposal.
A good strategy includes a set of coherent actions.
Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
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