We Deleted Our Roadmap

We used to have a public roadmap. A beautiful Notion board with columns for “Planned,” “In Progress,” and “Shipped.” Customers loved it. Prospects loved it. Our sales conversations got easier: “Yes, multi-currency invoicing is on the roadmap for Q3.”

Then Q3 arrived and we shipped something else. Something better. Something our biggest customers actually needed more. But the roadmap said multi-currency, so that’s what people expected. The support tickets started: “When is multi-currency shipping? It was supposed to be Q3.” A prospect who’d signed up specifically for that feature wanted a refund. A blog post had referenced our roadmap as a commitment.

A plan had become a contract. And we’d signed it without realizing.

The Roadmap Trap

Here’s what nobody tells you about public roadmaps: they don’t make you more accountable. They make you less agile. The moment you publish a feature with a date next to it, you’ve created an expectation. And expectations, once set, are nearly impossible to reset without damaging trust.

Product managers love roadmaps because they deflect hard conversations. “It’s on the roadmap” is the corporate equivalent of “thoughts and prayers.” It sounds responsive without actually committing to anything — except you have committed, because customers read “Q3” and hear “promise.”

We watched this happen for eighteen months. Features on the roadmap got built because they were on the roadmap, not because they were the most important thing we could build that week. We were optimizing for roadmap completion instead of customer impact.

That’s backwards. That’s a team working for a spreadsheet instead of for users.

What We Do Instead

We deleted the Notion board in January 2025. Replaced it with one rule: ship what matters this week.

Every Monday, we look at three things: what customers are asking for right now, what’s broken right now, and what would make Miru meaningfully better right now. We pick the highest-impact work and we do it. No six-month projections. No quarterly OKRs tied to feature launches. Just: what’s the best use of this week?

This is essentially Basecamp’s Shape Up methodology, stripped down further. Six-week cycles were still too long for us. We work in one-week bets. Small, shippable increments. If something takes longer than a week, it gets broken into pieces that each deliver value on their own.

The results speak: in the twelve months since deleting the roadmap, we’ve shipped 40% more features than the twelve months before. Not because we work harder. Because we stopped spending time maintaining, debating, and defending a document that was actively making our decisions worse.

But What About Customers?

Customers don’t actually want a roadmap. They want to know you’re listening. They want to see progress. They want to feel like the product is alive.

A shipped feature does all three. A roadmap item does none of them.

When a customer asks “are you going to build X?” we give them an honest answer: “That’s a great idea. We’re not committing to a timeline, but we hear you, and we’ll evaluate it against what we’re hearing from other customers.” Some people don’t love that answer. Those people would have loved our roadmap right up until the moment we missed a date, and then they’d have hated us.

We’d rather be honest and fast than predictable and slow.

The best roadmap is a shipped feature.