Roadmap Fiction
ELI5 - The Vibe Check
Q3 says 'internationalization.' Q4 says 'platform rewrite.' Everyone in the room nods, everyone privately knows neither is happening, and the roadmap gets presented to leadership anyway with a straight face. Roadmap fiction is the shared, unspoken agreement to treat a wildly optimistic planning document as though it were a real prediction of the future.
Real Talk
Roadmap fiction describes long-range product or engineering roadmaps that are presented with more certainty than the underlying estimates or resourcing can actually support. It persists because roadmaps serve organizational and stakeholder-communication functions beyond pure planning accuracy, but it erodes trust when the gap between roadmap and reality becomes too visible too often.
When You'll Hear This
"That roadmap is roadmap fiction, we haven't even scoped the Q4 item." / "I stopped taking the yearly roadmap literally after the third rewrite that never shipped."
Related Terms
Backlog
The backlog is the master to-do list for a product — every feature, bug, and idea that hasn't been built yet, prioritised by importance.
Epic
An epic is a big chunk of work that's too large to finish in one sprint, so it gets broken down into smaller user stories.
MVP (MVP)
An MVP is the simplest version of your product that actually works well enough for real users to use and for you to learn from.
Scope Creep
Scope creep is when a simple feature request slowly grows into rebuilding the entire application.
Sprint
A sprint is a fixed time-box — usually 1-2 weeks — where a team commits to completing a specific set of tasks.