Startup anti-roadmap

The one question I repeatedly ask every company for whom I work or consult is: What will you not do? If that proves too hard to answer or too puzzling, I will be more specific: Can you name a feature that one of your competitors has that you do not intend to emulate?

Can you name a feature that one of your competitors has, that you do not intend to emulate?

This question, too, is more often than not met with blank stares. Why would we not do this or that if some users want it? My interlocutors seem to be thinking.

If that seems benign to you, please read on because, in my experience, it is anything but.

What it means

Not having a ready answer to the question of what you will not be building means that, conceptually, you want to do everything. But you can’t do that now, can you? And even if you could, would it make sense? An oft-repeated trope states, “When you design for everyone, you design for no one.” Nobody wants or needs “everything.” Your desire to do everything isn’t a plan; it’s the absence of one: not knowing what you don’t want to be indicates that you don’t know what you want to be.

That is bad: you won’t be able to properly prioritize or avoid distractions if you don’t know where you’re going. On top of that, you will fail to benefit from synergies between features by shipping disparate items and are unlikely to execute well on any of your myriad projects.

As Sam Altman said in How To Start a Startup: “It’s much easier to expand from something that a small number of people love […] than from something that a lot of people like.” But who will love what you build if you’re piling on features pulled haphazardly out of an infinite backlog instead of passionately pursuing a deeply held vision?

There must be a better way

Anyone can make an infinite list of features they want to build, and anyone can sidestep the question of their vision by claiming they will build the next “super-app” or some such nonsense generality. In my experience, only the most impressive leaders take a stance on what they will not do.

As I’ve written before, it all starts with a strong vision, and a good vision should be prescriptive: from it should logically derive what you should and should not do. If you cannot name a feature you don’t intend to build, even though it would make sense for some of your competitors, I would take that as a sign that you have a vision deficit. You should start working on one, keeping in mind that it is often valuable to narrow your market down, again, for the sake of making something that people will be able to love.

But if you do have a vision, create an anti-roadmap as a companion. This will help your staff understand what your vision really means through examples of what you will not be doing and why.

Much like examples of the appropriate and inappropriate usage of a logo that you might find in a design guide, the anti-roadmap enriches the stated vision and mission by giving a guide as to what the company may be expected to do — and what not.

The anti-roadmap is a powerful way to indicate that you know what you intend to accomplish and guide your whole company so everyone can execute a common vision.

‍Originally published on Medium

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