Kill the quarterly roadmap, keep the direction

Two years ago we kept a proper roadmap. Quarterly planning weeks, OKR drafts in Notion, a review meeting every other Friday, and a Linear project called Q3 Commitments that we updated on Tuesdays and lied about on Fridays. We shipped things. We also spent about six engineering weeks per quarter arguing over rows in a spreadsheet.

We stopped doing that in March. What replaced it: a single Notion page called Next six months, in rough order. It fits on one screen. It has no dates past the current month, no confidence percentages, and no owner column.

What the page looks like

Three sections, always:

1. Now. Two or three things we are building this week and next. Each links to a Linear ticket.
2. Soon. Four to eight things we intend to start inside the next quarter. Ordered top to bottom by priority. No dates.
3. Later, probably. Bets we think matter for the six month horizon but have not committed to. Read the room, not the calendar.

The page has a Last edited line at the top. If it has been more than three weeks, someone owes the team an update on Slack.

What we killed with it

• The quarterly planning offsite. We used to lose a Thursday and half a Friday to it.
• The OKR grading meeting. Nobody misses it.
• The roadmap in Figma that lived in parallel to the Linear board and disagreed with it by week three.
• The reforecast conversation, where we pretended a plan drafted in January still described reality in April.

We kept the direction. The company still has a one paragraph statement of what we are building over the next 18 months. It sits at the top of the same page. Every commit against Now and Soon should be defensible against that paragraph.

Why the world changing is fine

When a competitor ships something surprising, or a big customer hits a wall, or Datadog tells us the ingestion pipeline is cracking, we open the page and reorder it. That takes an hour, not a planning cycle. The team sees the change on Slack the same day. Nobody asks whether we are missing a Q3 objective, because there is no Q3 objective to miss.

The trade we made: we gave up the theatre of certainty. We got back the six weeks a year we used to spend rehearsing it.