A couple weeks ago, we got together to talk about roadmaps. We did not stay on roadmaps. It was better for it. Here’s what actually came up: - There is no such thing as no roadmap. Call it a hope map, call it OKRs, call it a vision, if you’re telling someone what’s coming and when, you have a roadmap. OKRs are aspirational statements. A roadmap is a delivery plan. They are not the same thing, and confusing them leaves your team without either. - Fidelity matters more than format. Whatever format you use, the rule holds: high precision on what’s right in front of you, loose on everything else. You can tell a board almost anything about what’s happening in six months. What’s happening in the next six weeks needs to be tight. - Dates only when there’s a real reason. Hardware/software alignment. A committed press launch. That’s it. Otherwise you’re making promises to a calendar instead of to your customer. - The PM-to-engineer ratio tells you about the org, not the PM. One person covering four product areas with an AI team of agents is either a sign of a very strong product culture or a very small budget. Sometimes both. - Tech debt is a first-class citizen or it becomes a crisis. It was a great chat and I look forward to our next one. The poll on topics will be out tomorrow for those that want to vote.

Coffee in the Room is back tomorrow evening — this time we’re talking roadmaps. The ones everyone loves to hate. The ones that are either too high level or too low level, that overlap quarters and look janky, that nobody believes and everybody ignores. Come ready to talk about what’s actually working for you, what you’ve ditched, and how you’re thinking about roadmaps in a world where AI makes them easier to maintain but the pressure to commit hasn’t changed. Wednesday 21st October 6:00pm BST / 10:00am Pacific Hope to see you there. ☕

That’s the closing line from a piece by Ravi Mehta published earlier this month and it got my attention. His argument is sharp. You can eliminate the PM role. You can flatten the team. You can distribute the responsibilities. But the work remains. Someone still has to talk to customers. Own the vision. Connect features to business outcomes. Protect the quality bar. Decide what deserves to ship. If nobody does that work, the product culture shrinks. And after rounds of layoffs and efficiency drives, he worries a lot of companies are watching exactly that happen right now. The part that resonated most for me was this: the PM-to-engineer ratio tells you almost nothing about PM talent. It tells you everything about the organization around the PM. A 1:30 ratio could mean a brilliant product culture where founders, designers, engineers, and researchers all amplify the PM. Or it could mean one exhausted ticket writer building whatever the loudest stakeholder wants. Same number. Opposite cultures. His take is that AI shifts the bottleneck from building to judging. More options. Cheaper to build. Faster to ship. But empathy, strategy, judgment, and taste are what determine whether that speed creates progress or just noise. We don’t need PMs spending more time building. We need them spending more time figuring out where we’re actually going. Worth a read. Link here. Which of these 12 feels most underdone in your organization right now?

I read an interesting study from Metis Strategy this week that basically that if 2025 was the year of AI experimentation, 2026 is the year of proof. Boards and leadership teams want to know what the AI investment actually changed not what shipped, what changed. And a lot of teams built the pilot but never built the reporting or feedback loop. They can describe what they shipped without being able to prove what it worked. I think that the feedback loop is probably the Product Manager's to solve. Which by default means the PM role isn't shrinking because of AI. Instead we are being asked to use our judgement to decide what is worth building, prove it works, and know when to pull the plug. Just like always. :) How are you measuring whether what you built with AI is actually working?