Making Roadmap Confidence Explicit: Janna Bastow’s Call for Transparency

In a recent LinkedIn post, Janna Bastow explores the often-unspoken confidence levels associated with product roadmap items and advocates for making these explicit to improve stakeholder alignment and decision-making.

Bastow highlights a common pitfall in product development: the assumption that every item on a roadmap carries an equal, unspoken certainty of success. She argues that stakeholders are frequently left to guess these confidence levels, and their estimations are often inaccurate, leading to misaligned expectations.

Every item on your roadmap has an implicit confidence level. Your stakeholders are already guessing at it. They’re almost certainly guessing wrong.

The core of Bastow’s argument centers on the power of quantifying uncertainty. She suggests that by assigning a confidence percentage to each roadmap item, product teams can foster a more realistic and transparent planning process. This approach, she posits, moves away from the often misleading pretense that every initiative is a guaranteed success.

The Perils of the ‘Sure Thing’ Mentality

Bastow points out that traditional roadmap presentations can inadvertently create an illusion of certainty. When every feature or project is presented without an indication of its potential risk or success probability, leaders may be led to believe that all planned initiatives are equally likely to achieve their intended outcomes. This can lead to misallocation of resources and misguided strategic bets.

According to Bastow, the practice of treating all roadmap items as ‘sure things’ obscures the inherent experimentation and learning involved in product development. She advocates for a more honest appraisal of what is known and what is yet to be discovered.

Introducing Explicit Confidence Levels

The central proposal from Bastow is to make these confidence levels explicit. By labeling each item with a percentage, teams can signal the degree of certainty they have about its potential impact, feasibility, or market reception. This doesn’t mean abandoning ambitious goals, but rather framing them within a realistic understanding of the unknowns.

This week’s SimplyProduct is about making that number explicit, and why “this is a 30% experiment” is a stronger statement than pretending everything’s a sure thing.

Bastow suggests that such transparency can fundamentally alter how roadmaps are perceived and utilized. Instead of a static list of commitments, the roadmap becomes a dynamic tool that reflects ongoing learning and evolving understanding of the market and user needs. This encourages more informed discussions about prioritization and investment.

Rethinking Roadmap Visualization

Bastow poses a critical question to prompt further reflection on this concept:

What would your roadmap look like if you had to label every item with a confidence percentage?

This question invites leaders and teams to visualize the implications of such a shift. It suggests that a roadmap populated with confidence percentages might look significantly different, potentially highlighting areas of high-risk, high-reward initiatives alongside more predictable, lower-risk items. This could lead to more nuanced strategic planning, where resources are allocated not just based on perceived value, but also on the associated level of confidence and risk tolerance.

In essence, Janna Bastow’s insights on LinkedIn call for a more mature and transparent approach to product roadmapping, urging teams to embrace and communicate the inherent uncertainties in innovation. By making confidence levels explicit, organizations can foster better alignment, manage expectations effectively, and ultimately drive more successful product outcomes.