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In your last product strategy meeting, how much time was spent looking forward versus looking back? It’s a common scene: we do the next item of work without considering if it’s the right thing, pointing to a line item on a twelve-month-old roadmap, a plan created in a different reality. You’re trying to drive the business forward, but your teams are navigating by looking in the rearview mirror.
A plan like this doesn’t illuminate the road ahead; it only reflects commitments made in the past. When your roadmap focuses only on where you’ve been, you’re guaranteed to miss the opportunities right in front of you.
The Hidden Costs of a Static Plan
An inflexible roadmap isn’t just an administrative headache; it’s a direct threat to your business agility and a quiet killer of innovation.
- Paralysis by Plan: Teams are forced to choose between following an irrelevant plan or going rogue, creating friction and misalignment.
- Wasted Opportunity: By locking in features months in advance, you lose the ability to react to new market insights or customer feedback, effectively ceding ground to more nimble competitors.
- Broken Trust: When roadmaps consistently fail to reflect reality, they undermine trust between leadership, product teams, and stakeholders, making true alignment impossible.
From Fixed Plans to Living Guides: A Glimpse of the Solution
The solution is to transform your roadmap from a rigid, feature-based timeline into a dynamic, outcome-focused guide. In SAFe®, this is the Creating Responsive Roadmaps competency.
This approach reframes a roadmap as a strategic communication tool, not an unbreakable promise. It’s a living document that adapts to new information. One of the key tools SAFe uses to prioritize items on this flexible roadmap is Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF). Instead of prioritizing based on emotion or seniority, WSJF provides an economic framework to determine which features will deliver the most value in the shortest time, ensuring you’re always working on the most important thing.
Your First Step
You can start making your roadmap more responsive today with a simple change in language. This week, pick one high-level initiative on your current roadmap and reframe it with this question:
“For every item currently listed on our roadmap, can we clearly articulate the specific desired outcome and the measurable impact it is expected to have?”
This question helps foster a shared understanding of success criteria and forces everyone to step back from the feature list to ensure the work is tied to the overarching business goals. If a feature cannot be tied to any expected outcome, reconsider its place on the roadmap.
Unlock the Full Blueprint
Shifting your language is the first step, but building a truly responsive planning process requires a complete system. The Creating Responsive Roadmaps competency provides a full blueprint for connecting strategy to execution, using milestones effectively, and facilitating collaborative planning events.
Stop letting outdated plans dictate your future.
Unlock the full Framework, competencies, and guidance you need to build roadmaps that adapt and lead your organization to success. Get complete access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.
In this Series:
- Catch up on last week’s post: Flying Blind: When a Lack of Metrics Grounds Your Product Strategy
- Coming next week: Accelerating Product Flow
1 “Why Product Teams Keep Roadmaps and Processes Consistent,” ProductPlan, accessed October 28, 2025, https://www.productplan.com/roadmap-processes-consistent/.