Technical-Planning

A technical roadmap is supposed to answer a simple question: what are we building, when, and why? In practice, most roadmaps fail to do this usefully — they’re either so high-level they don’t convey meaningful information, so granular they’re out of date within a week, or honest about neither the priorities nor the uncertainty. The engineers who build good roadmaps understand that a roadmap is a communication tool, not a plan. It’s for alignment, not prediction. ...

Most technical projects fail at the scoping phase, not the execution phase. The project that ran over by six months, produced something that didn’t quite match expectations, or got cancelled partway through — in nearly every case, the root problem was established in the first few weeks, before most engineers started working. Scoping isn’t writing a requirements document. It’s the thinking process that determines whether a project has a coherent, achievable definition before resources are committed to it. Done well, it prevents three months of work from being thrown away. Done poorly — or skipped — it virtually guarantees it. ...