Our roadmap has three columns and no dates. Here is how I sell that to sales.
Every quarter someone from sales asks me for "the roadmap with dates," and every quarter I give them the same document: three columns called Now, Next and Later, with no dates on anything past the current quarter. It took a while to make this work politically, so here is what I've learned. Why no dates A date on a roadmap item six months out is not a plan. It's a guess that becomes a promise the moment it leaves the…