Why Most Product Roadmaps Are a Lie (And How I Stopped Pretending Mine Wasn't)

The roadmap I built was gorgeous

When I joined Sonic Linker's founding team, one of my first tasks was creating a product roadmap. I did everything right. Talked to early users, mapped out three quarters, categorized features into themes (Platform Stability, AI Accuracy, Enterprise Readiness). Even color-coded the whole thing.

Three months later, we had shipped our core AI SaaS product. And when I looked back at that roadmap, maybe 40% of what we actually built was on there.

The other 60%? Stuff we discovered we needed while building. API changes because a design partner needed a different integration. A completely different onboarding flow because our first users got confused in ways I hadn't predicted. Performance fixes that became urgent when we hit our first scale issues.

The roadmap wasn't wrong because I planned badly. It was wrong because I was pretending I could predict the future.

Here's what roadmaps actually are

After that experience, and then managing 20+ enterprise clients at Finvestfx, I realized roadmaps serve a completely different purpose than we admit.

They're how you say no without saying no.

At Finvestfx, when a client asked for a custom workflow feature, I couldn't just say "that's not important enough." But I could say "that's interesting, let me see where it fits in our Q3 priorities." The roadmap gave me a framework to have that conversation. Sometimes the feature made it in. Often it didn't. But the roadmap let me negotiate rather than reject.

They're how you align a team on direction, not on tasks.

When I was coaching 60 insurance advisors and IFAs at NJ Group on product adoption, I learned that people don't need a detailed plan. They need to know what we're trying to accomplish and roughly when. "We're focused on making the policy comparison tool faster this quarter" is way more useful than a Gantt chart of 47 sub-features.

They're how you manage expectations with stakeholders who want certainty.

Investors, executives, sales teams... they all want to know "when will X be ready?" A roadmap lets you give an answer that feels concrete without actually promising anything. I started adding a disclaimer to every roadmap: "This represents our current thinking and will change as we learn more." Nobody ever read it, but it was there.

What I do instead now

I still make roadmaps. But I've changed how I think about them.

I plan in problems, not solutions. Instead of "Build advanced filtering UI," I write "Users can't find specific transactions quickly." This keeps options open. Maybe the solution is better filtering. Maybe it's smarter defaults. Maybe it's a completely different approach we haven't thought of yet.

I commit to timeframes, not features. At Sonic Linker, once I stopped pretending the roadmap was a contract, I got more honest. "In Q2, we're focused on improving AI accuracy" is true even if the specific features change. "We're shipping the advanced prompt builder in May" becomes a lie the moment priorities shift.

I update it constantly. A roadmap that hasn't changed in two months is fiction. I review ours every sprint. Not to rewrite everything, but to acknowledge what we learned and adjust. When a Finvestfx client churned because of a workflow issue I hadn't prioritized, that went straight into the roadmap review. The next client didn't churn for the same reason.

I make the assumptions visible. Every major item on my roadmap now has a "why now" attached to it. Not buried in a PRD, right there on the roadmap. "Improving onboarding because 40% of trials don't complete setup" is way more useful than "Onboarding v2." When the assumption changes (trial completion jumps to 80%), the priority can change without anyone feeling betrayed.

The real reason roadmaps fail

It's not because PMs are bad at planning. It's because we're asked to plan things that can't be planned.

You can't plan discovery. You can't plan what you'll learn from users. You can't plan how long it actually takes to solve a gnarly technical problem until you're in the middle of it.

What you can plan is where you're looking and what you're trying to accomplish. The roadmap I wish I'd built at Sonic Linker would have said "Ship a working AI SaaS platform that solves X problem" instead of listing 30 features. We would have hit that goal in the same three months, but I wouldn't have felt like the roadmap was a failure.

So yeah, most roadmaps are a lie. But that's okay, as long as everyone knows it. The dangerous roadmaps are the ones where the PM actually believes they're telling the truth.