Why feature roadmaps don’t work for early-stage startups

Written on 12/15/2025
Ankush Gupta

The comfort and the cost of knowing what’s next.

An example of a feature-based roadmap
Imagine this scenario:
You are working with a passionate founder. They want to build a product which they are super sure of; they have their pitch deck ready, investors are lined up, and they want to hit market in six months. All they need is a working product: an embodiment of their mission. As a product manager, you do the usual. In a short duration, you conjure up enough details to come up with a roadmap. A plan with all the required features to put the product in the hands of potential users. It is well-detailed, with release dates and launch timelines. You align the team and start development. What could go wrong?

Working constantly with early-stage startups has taught me one thing: startups are a minefield of uncertainty. If a founder believes they have all their answers on day one, they pretty much have a dream to sell you. It might just say that on the pitch deck.

In my experience, anything a startup builds in its early stages is a whole lot of assumptions wrapped around a concrete vision. When you start treating these assumptions as ground reality and planning features rather than outcomes, you create a recipe for trouble. A well-documented, timeline-based feature roadmap is often where the problem starts.

These plans actually give founder and teams a false sense of security. However, teams very quickly realise that:

Feature roadmaps limit exploration and discovery. If the boundaries of exploration are limited to a predefined feature set, you quickly find yourself boxed in. Instead of giving the team ample time to actually solve problems, you end up preparing for the next release cycle as the team focuses on building the current feature on the list.

Feature roadmaps leave little room for new information. These plans operate under the conviction that all underlying assumptions have been fully priced in, locking potential ideas, features, and deadlines in advance.

However, as you start working on the product, the act of building itself brings significant clarity. New information either challenges or validates previously made assumptions. As a result, you are compelled to carve out a new shape for the product — one that reflects an evolved understanding, sometimes with a focus on revised outcomes.

This is where feature roadmaps fail to adapt. They are built for predictability, and any change often leads to delays or scope expansion. You then have to resist new ideas and information just to stay on track with previously set timelines.

Feature roadmaps have a confidence bias. They inherently believe that the solution, from the outset, is already fit for the market in its current shape. What is supposed to be a strategic and continuous discovery turns into a scheduling exercise. In reality, just because you are solving the right problem doesn’t mean the current shape of the product will perform well in the market.

Feature roadmaps underestimate the invisible work. Development teams often require a fair amount of time and effort to figure out the right way to build before dipping their hands into execution. This is difficult to plan for, as the paths of discovery are not always linear. Sometimes you have to spend more time delivering the same planned item. The timeline is affected not by new demands, but by a well-defined scope.

A PM I know used to say ‘Roadmaps are the glue that makes strategy stick to planning’. Lately, I feel the longer they are planned for, the harder they set in, making things very difficult and costly to pull away.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying they are a bad exercise. Early-stage startups need to have a vision and a pathway to get there, and roadmaps serve that purpose effectively. What I do take issue with is the way of thinking that propagates building ‘all the things we thought were correct then’ at the cost of ‘what we know now’, treating previous ideas as gospel truth. A product being built just for the sake of it. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone.

So, what’s the alternative?

  1. Building roadmaps around outcomes, not features. This gives your team the agility to adapt to one of the umpteen pathways that could be used to arrive at the desired outcome. Outcome-focused roadmaps also ensure that the team focuses on solving the problem at hand and not just checking stories off a to-do list.
  2. Make clarity your top priority. Be it through initial research, alpha releases, or targeted experiments, your first three months should focus on validating your assumptions. These will help you plan a more robust roadmap, rather than building a product on ideas made of sand.
  3. Use the 666 method. A way of mapping horizons based on what your startup needs to focus on over the next 6 years, 6 months, and 6 weeks.
  • Next 6 years. This is your north star, the team’s vision of the future six years from now. This will change and evolve as your team learns how your product is built, adopted, and integrated into your users’ lives. Please do not create a fixed plan for six years.
  • Next 6 months. This is your pathway of putting the product in front of your users for the very first time. It is a culmination of all your current beliefs, learnings and insights. The team should assume that only 50–60% of this plan will actually get built. The rest will emerge based on what you discover along the way, creating a need to revisit and revise this plan every couple of months.
  • Next 6 weeks. This is where a feature roadmap makes sense. Once your team is confident on what needs to be built next, create a small, focused plan. Once locked in, changes here should be minimal. Make sure you know what you want to learn from the outcome of these six weeks. This is the only horizon where going granular is appropriate.

Lastly, learn to balance and realign. Planning works best when delivery and discovery are mapped together, each informing and correcting the other.

References:

Why feature roadmaps don’t work for early-stage startups was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.