Why roadmaps stall between strategy and delivery

An operator agrees a strategy in January. By June, a handful of items have shipped and the rest are late. The strategy was usually sound. What fails sits between the slide and the release.

The most common cause is a roadmap that adds up to more work than the teams can do. Every function adds its priorities. Product, marketing, compliance, payments and the commercial team each have a list, and the roadmap is the sum. Nobody has compared that sum with the number of engineers, analysts and testers available. Say a roadmap holds 40 initiatives and the delivery teams can finish about 12 in a half-year. Twenty-eight of them will slip, and nobody can say in advance which.

The fix is arithmetic. Count the capacity in weeks per team, size each initiative in the same unit, and stop adding when the total is reached. The initiatives that fall off the list should be named, with the people who asked for them told. That conversation is uncomfortable, and it is cheaper than the alternative.

Shared teams cause the second problem. One integration team supports payments, games, CRM and reporting. Each project needs them for a few weeks, all in the same quarter. The roadmap shows five parallel streams, and the team can only run two. A dependency chart that shows which team is needed when exposes the clash early.

Third, outcomes with no owner. A project often has a project manager and a sponsor, and nobody accountable for the commercial result. Delivery is declared when the feature is live. Nobody checks whether it changed anything. A named owner per initiative, with a stated measure and a date to review it, changes how decisions are made along the way.

Fourth, suppliers. Much of an operator's delivery depends on a platform provider, a payments partner or a games studio. Their release calendars are not yours. If the plan assumes a feature in March and the supplier's own roadmap shows it in September, the plan is wrong before it starts. Ask for written commitments, with dates and a named contact, and track them in the same list as internal work.

Fifth, approvals that arrive late. Compliance review, legal sign-off, security checks and finance approval are often left to the end. A feature built in eight weeks then waits six for review. Involve these functions at the start of the work, and book their time in the plan like any other resource.

Sixth, the unplanned request. A commercial opportunity or a partner demand appears mid-quarter and goes to the front of the queue. A few of these are healthy. A steady flow of them is the real roadmap, and the planned one is a document that nobody follows. Reserve a fixed share of capacity, perhaps 15% to 20%, for requests like these. When it is used up, the next request has to displace something visible.

Strategy documents add to the problem when they describe themes and not choices. A theme such as improving retention can justify twenty projects. A choice, such as cutting reactivation cost per incremental player by a third this year, can justify three. Ask of every strategic goal which projects would stop if it were taken seriously. If the answer is none, the goal is a wish.

Plan in quarters with a firm commitment for the current one and a looser view of the next two. Limit the number of initiatives in progress at the same time. Finishing five things ahead of starting twelve gets more to production.

Hold a short weekly review of dependencies and blockers, with the people who can clear them in the room. Most delays are known to someone two weeks before they are reported.

Keep a visible list of what was dropped and why. It shows that trade-offs are being made on purpose, and it stops dropped items returning unnoticed.

Review the plan against delivery monthly. Compare what was committed with what shipped. A team that hits 60% every quarter should plan for 60%, and ask why.

Five questions for leadership:

• How many initiatives are in the plan and how many can we finish with the people we have?
• Which three teams are needed by the most projects, and when?
• Who is accountable for the commercial result of each initiative?
• Which supplier dates is our plan relying on, and are they in writing?
• What did we drop last quarter, and who agreed to it?