Decide what to sell in the customer’s money, not in your feature list.

What it looks like from the inside

• A roadmap nobody can trace back to a movement in the market
• Value argued in features and engineering effort, in units the customer’s finance team would not recognise
• Competitors compared from memory, each on a different scorecard
• Price set from cost-plus, or from whatever the last deal closed at
• Disruptions debated rather than compared, because each one is argued differently
• A product plan with no named owner and no date

The method

Three stages, three sessions, at least a week apart. Eight questions in each — twenty-four artefacts and three output pages. Each stage ends in one page, and that page is the next stage’s agenda: nothing starts until the stage above it has an answer. The gap between sessions is where the work happens — the sessions themselves are for deciding.

Environment. Size the market and split it by application rather than by geography. Map the value chain end to end and mark where the margin actually sits. Take the cost and performance curve your customers have already committed to — that is the bar every roadmap item has to clear. And test every disruption the same four ways, so they can be compared instead of argued. Ends in one page: the ranked opportunities and threats.

Situation. Score the business against market requirements, and score every competitor on that same single scorecard. One scorecard is the whole point: the moment each competitor gets its own, the comparison becomes opinion. The cells get filled by teardown — architecture and cost — rather than by whichever source happened to cover that competitor, and the cells you cannot fill are marked unknown, which is a finding rather than an embarrassment. Then define the value metric — the unit the customer actually buys in — and test it with real customers before trusting it. Ends in one page: the critical issues to address.

Strategy. Financial and strategic objectives first. Then where you will play, and where you deliberately will not. Then the product roadmap, and separately the technology roadmap — what has to be invented before any of it can ship. Then the risks. In that order, because a roadmap built before the objectives is a wish list with dates on it. Ends in one page: twelve months of actions, each with an owner.

The three-stage structure, the value metric and the single-scorecard discipline follow the work of Michael Chase, author of Equipped to Win, on value-based strategy for capital equipment.

One named owner per workstream throughout. The facilitator runs the sessions and owns none of the content — if the strategy leaves with the consultant, it was never yours.

Where this has been done. A sapphire crystal growth furnace business, acquired and scaled. The product strategy this process produced supported roughly a billion dollars of bookings inside two years.

When this is the wrong tool

If you have one product and one customer, you do not have a roadmap problem — you have a concentration problem, and that is a different conversation. And if the roadmap is fine but nothing ships, the constraint is engineering capacity or change control, not strategy. Fixing the strategy will not make the release land.

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▸ Read the thinking first: the roadmap is what engineering was going to build anyway.