The roadmap is the most expensive lie in product management. I have made them at Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, and four startups, and every one was fiction within six weeks of the date on the title slide. So yes, kill the roadmap as a fixed commitment. But kill it the right way: replace it with a live artifact that tells the truth, not with chaos.
Why the roadmap keeps breaking
Three things about roadmaps are load-bearing and broken at the same time. It rewards conviction theater, so the PM who writes the most confident plan wins the most trust, not the one who is most correct. It fossilizes old signal, freezing a plan built on customer conversations from last month and adoption curves from before the last model release. And it creates a re-plan tax: everyone knows the plan is wrong, but changing it needs exec review and stakeholder comms, so you execute against a plan you know is wrong because the cost of changing it feels higher than the cost of being wrong.
Before AI this was survivable. Now your competitor can ship a prototype in an afternoon and a locked roadmap is a commitment to being slow.
What I run instead
I stopped publishing roadmaps about 14 months ago. I run a one-page live bet portfolio that updates every Monday. Three sections and that is it.
Active bets, 5 to 7 maximum. Each has the hypothesis, the surface, the signal we watch, the kill condition, the next decision date, and cost-so-far. Recently killed, a rolling 30 days of what we stopped and learned. This is the most important section and the one most orgs refuse to make public. Make it public anyway. It earns more trust than ten successful launches. And a standing queue of fewer than 20 items waiting for a trigger. More than that and you are rebuilding a backlog.
The same version goes to the board, to sales, to CS, to engineering. If I feel the urge to clean it up for a board meeting, that is the signal my internal version is not honest enough yet.
The hardest part is emotional
A roadmap that claims certainty feels safer than a portfolio that admits bets. You want the false comfort. Resist it. The roadmap does not protect you, it only delays the moment you admit the plan was wrong, and the delay costs you trust when the truth arrives. The shift is from "here is what we will do" to "here is what we are learning."
You probably cannot delete your company's roadmap on Monday, but you can build a bet portfolio alongside it this week. Open one page, title it "Active Bets," and write the five things your team is actually working on right now as bets, each with a kill condition. If you cannot write the kill condition, that is a finding.