Roadmaps are fake

You have no idea what your market, competitors, growth, adoption, or team will look like in a couple years. Why pretend?

Keeping a long roadmap (or backlog) just sets bad expectations. Your users hear about something you’re planning for the future, want it, and immediately feel like it’s late. You made them unhappy with your current product for no reason.

Other teams at your company hear you say “sure, that’s on the roadmap” (probably in an effort to get out of committing to something), but really they get used to all of their requests defaulting to “yes, but later”. This gets translated in their minds to “I expect a yes every time”, which is also bad.

Have conviction about the direction your product is going, and the next couple problems you want to solve for your users. Thinking more about those problems than features you want to ship keeps you much more flexible than those one-off requests you promised three quarters ago. It’s better for you users and your sanity.