What does your roadmap look like?

@joshtronic has some really solid points. Here. Namely:

• Something long-term may be overkill if it's just you
• A short-term 'roadmap' can be completely fine
• Try and limit backlog size

I've done lots of roadmaps in lots of different formats in my paid work, but they're not that useful in the classic format people think about them (i.e. when things will get roughly done over a time period).

People request them when:

1. They want some certainty around when things will be delivered
2. There's lots of competing ideas, and they want a format that gets people agree to what gets done first

Lets not bother talking about all the obvious problems with #1, but re #2, you don't need a roadmap for this - you just need a prioritised backlog.

(Whether that's a 'delivery' backlog of what you're going to deliver in the next week or two, or a high-level backlog of epics/initiative which may take 1/2 months each to work on).

After all, a classic roadmap is just:

• A list of ideas
• In a priority order
• With a definitive date of delivery

So get rid of the final bit, and just have a list of ideas you continually groom and prioritise according to your goals at the time/user feedback.

I live fairly unscripted in the long term, and try to plan out little wins on a weekly basis.

Those weekly tasks usually include the tasks that people keep bringing to my attention (this assumes you are having conversations with [potential] customers regularly.

That's not to say I don't have long term goals or vision, I just keep those in my head up until it's time to actually implement them. Often times my crazy ideas don't pan out in terms of validation, or I simply realize/remember that good ideas don't necessarily line up with what customers are barking about.

Not really a template, but I limit my "this week" task list to 25 items per week (for all projects, work, life, etc). I also keep a list for "next week" also limited to 25 items that includes the day to day crap / ideas that come up.

Every week I go through the exercise of "backlog grooming" where I take all of the open tasks in both columns, and create a new "this week" list of up to 25 items.

When doing the grooming, often times I'll remove items completely as they are things that have fallen off as being relevant. Flexibility and never being committed in stone to anything has worked out very well for me personally.

Building a great freakin' product is always of the utmost importance, and I don't necessarily believe that having a formal roadmap contributes to that.

That said, curious what others have to say, always looking to refactor and optimize my current workflow :)