What is a Product Roadmap?
A product roadmap communicates direction over time: themes and outcomes now / next / later — deliberately coarser than a release plan and outcome-oriented rather than a feature promise list with dates. Its job is alignment: everyone rowing the same direction without pretending month nine is knowable.
The anti-pattern is the roadmap-as-contract: dated feature commitments a year out, which converts learning into "slippage" and kills the adaptation agile exists for.
Worked example
A logistics product's roadmap: Now — cut onboarding time (guided setup, templates); Next — win enterprise (SSO, audit logs); Later — international (multi-currency, customs). Sales can talk direction with customers, engineering keeps sequencing freedom, and when a huge prospect makes SSO urgent, "next" becomes "now" without anyone calling it a broken promise.