A few weeks ago we tackled the subject of How Does a Vendor Build a GOOD Solution? and outlined seven key steps. SI received some feedback, and most of it revolved around the roadmap and how it should only look three months out!

So we have to address this insanity!

First of all, name ONE great or revolutionary technological invention that was invented with three months effort. You can’t, because there isn’t one.

Now name ONE great piece of software that solves a significant business problem that no other system that came before solved that was invented with three months effort. You can’t, because there isn’t one.

Now name ONE Billion dollar enterprise software platform that went to market with an MVP in 3 months that became a powerhouse that a large swath of businesses are using. You can’t, because there isn’t one.

All you can do in three months is a crap an app that is a piece of crap. Now, you might be able to make a big splash on the app store or in the consumer shareware market, but enterprise software is a complex piece of enterprise technology that requires years of development … and years of planning!

Secondly, remember what a roadmap actually is. It’s a graphical document that shows all of the roads you have available to you, how fast you can travel down them, and where they will take you. It’s not a detailed travel plan!

Similarly, in technology, a roadmap lists out all the things you would like to do, what it might take to get there, and what options could take you there. It is NOT a detailed functional specification or a development plan for the next three to five years (which should be the length of time you should be thinking through). (Also remember that, historically, great inventions came from research labs where the researchers were thinking three, five, and even ten years out and had years to develop groundbreaking developments!)

There are a number of reasons you need to be thinking three years out (even if your plans completely change nine months in), but the most critical reason is this:

If you plan for three months, or go for speed over quality (assuming you can always fix it later) your teams take shortcuts, build crap infrastructure, and add technical debt faster than you can ever eliminate it! (It’s almost as bad as vibe coding your way to an MVP, and then realizing you can never support an enterprise stack on it and have to go back and rebuild it from the bottom up after you’ve wasted months of effort and tens of thousands (or more) on AI credits. (Alex Turnbull gives a good summary in this LinkedIn post.)

When you start thinking about where your enterprise application might need to go, even if you choose not to go in that direction, you understand what processes you will eventually need to support and how you will need to build the foundational data model, workflow and orchestration engine, integration capabilities, internationalization support, and other core foundational features to either build that out or integrate that capability in the future. You’ll have a better idea of what you’ll need in the stack, what you’ll need for the platform, and what the best development environments for your team will be. (Having to change out any of these is very time consuming and expensive should you make a mistake early on.)

For (an easily understood) example, if you think invoice processing sucks (because you only looked at three vendors as you are too clueless to do market research, like many vendors that started during COVID because they all of a sudden realized that the business back-office should be capable of running 100% online, distributed, and remote), what else are you likely going to do after that. (Unless you’re a world leader in invoice processing technology, no one is going to buy just that!) In other words, are you going to support invoice analysis and predictive payment analytics, payment platform integration, contract and PO data extraction and matching, enhanced procurement (platform) support, etc. All of these capabilities will dictate data model, orchestration, and stack requirements.

Again, the point is not to plan out a detailed release schedule, but understand where your customers might ask you to go, where you want to go, where you want to hire a guide (to provide you with the expertise you need), and where you might want to hire a service to take your customers there (because a certain capability is best done by a specialist). This, along with constant monitoring of customer functionality uptake, customer feedback, and user forums will give you the complete picture you need to create the high level development plan for the year and the detailed functional specification for the final release of the next quarter (which might be built incrementally using agile methodology).

To put this in terms non-technical people will understand, you can’t build a twenty-story high-rise on a foundation for a two-story house. By thinking ahead, you’re building a solid foundation, and when you start building, you’re building the frame for the twenty-story high-rise that you can then build out and complete floor-by-floor once you know what the tenants you are signing on want on their floor.

By thinking at a high level years into the future, you are visualizing how you are going to fit into and evolve with the organizational ecosystem you want to sell into, and you are making good architectural decisions as you will be able to build that understanding of what you’ll need to support!

Moreover, as one commenter pointed out, and we noted above, watching how users work with the system is key! That not only helps you understand the depth and configurability of workflow process management required, the breadth of the data models that will be needed, and what systems they will want interfaces to (based on what they use before and after), but how to design a good UX based on now they work and what they are adopting! (It should be noted that designing a good UX, including a good UI, can be harder than the model and controller algorithms — which, if you need advanced analytics, optimization, and higher performance, might take a PhD to get right — because it doesn’t matter how good the application core is if no one uses it!)

Roadmaps are key. That’s how your Chief Software Architect and Chief Technology Officer build great applications. It ensures that once you select a destination, they know the route they have to navigate to get there!