Notes
Monday, February 02, 2026

Strategy vs. Roadmap: A PM's Guide

Most PMs think a roadmap is their strategy. It isn't. If you've ever felt like you're just managing a Tetris board of feature requests, you’re likely confusing your destination with the steps you're taking to get there.

The Difference (And Why It Matters)

Most PMs do Roadmapping. They focus on the "What" and the "When." It's a list of features, a timeline, and a series of ship dates. It's essentially a delivery schedule disguised as a plan.

Better PMs do Strategy first. They focus on the "Why" and the "How we win." Strategy is a set of choices about how you will overcome a specific challenge or capture a specific opportunity. It’s the logic that justifies the items on the roadmap.

Strategy is the engine; the roadmap is just the dashboard showing where the car is headed today.

Why the Strategy-First Approach Works Better

When you lead with strategy, your conversations with stakeholders change. Instead of arguing about whether "Feature A" should be in Q3 or Q4, you're aligned on the problem you're trying to solve.

  • Saying "No" becomes easier: You aren't being mean; you're just pointing out that the request doesn't align with the current strategic pillar.
  • Autonomy for the team: If the team understands the strategy (the outcome), they can pivot the roadmap (the output) when they discover a better way to achieve the goal.
  • Avoids Roadmap Debt: You stop committing to "maybe" features six months in advance just to fill a slide.

When a Roadmap-First Approach Fails

If you have a roadmap without a strategy, you're running a feature factory. You might ship 100% of your committed features on time and still see your North Star metric stay completely flat because you never validated the underlying logic of why those features mattered.

The Monday Morning Audit

Take a look at your current roadmap. For every item on there, ask yourself: "What specific strategic bet are we making here, and how will we know if we were wrong?" If you can't answer that, you don't have a roadmap problem—you have a strategy problem.

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