Roadmaps considered harmful
Roadmaps are dangerous | (Signal vs Noise)
The author here creates a nice juicy (can straw be juicy?) straw man and then proceeds to tear it down. Roadmaps force you to follow yesterday today. Huh? This makes no sense. Since when did creating a roadmap make its implementors irrational?
My personal rule for roadmaps is to recreate them every month. Does #$#! happen to roadmaps? Sure. If you didn’t have a roadmap, would #$!$@ happen? Sure. So what’s the difference? A roadmap is just your product’s best guess at the needs of the market — and here’s the key term — right now. It gives your customers something to chew on - something to react to - something to comment about. Customers often want to see you have a vision for the space, the article even admits as much. Well, write that down and you have yourself a $2 roadmap.
Another straw man I’ve seen recently? All these webinar detractors in favor of pod/vidcasts. I don’t know about you guys, but we don’t do any webinars unless we provide them in downloadable format after the event. Give that a fancy name like Web 2.0 permissions marketing, and now you’re really cooking with gas. We must be doing something new and different. Please!