Aligned

Chapter 6

Changes

Align with stakeholders on when to say “no” together

After finally aligning everyone around a roadmap, you may think the task is complete. Very often, however, maintaining alignment on a roadmap over time is actually more difficult than establishing it in the first place.

Most roadmaps require not only longer-term strategic changes, which can be planned ahead of time, but also urgent changes to the current priorities, which require trade-offs and difficult decision making. This chapter will build on the process we discuss in Chapter 5, by showing you how to work with stakeholders as things change.

In this chapter you will learn how to do the following:

• Manage ongoing requests.
• Plan for routine roadmap updates, and avoid Alignment Decay.
• Decide whether to say yes or no to a roadmap update.
• Say “no” tactfully and effectively.

Let’s check in with Irie six weeks into the new roadmap. Engineering and data science are making progress on the new AI features. A few features have already been released in the app. But some stakeholders still seem confused about how they can contribute to the roadmap when they have new ideas.