From Vision to Strategy to Roadmap: Avoiding the Collapse
Vision, strategy, and roadmap are three distinct artifacts that serve three different purposes. Most organizations collapse them together — and the collapse is where execution fails.
“Our vision is to be the leading platform for workforce management.” Here is the roadmap for Q3.”
The gap between those two sentences is where most product execution fails. The vision is directional but not actionable. The roadmap is actionable but not strategic. Between them, the strategy that should translate one into the other is missing — or exists only as a mental model in the CPO’s head.
This three-layer structure — vision, strategy, roadmap — is one of the most discussed frameworks in product management. It is also one of the most consistently violated in practice. Understanding the precise role of each layer and what happens when they collapse is the first step to building the connective tissue that makes them work.
What Each Layer Is For
Vision is a description of the future state you are building toward. It answers: what will be true about the world (or your market, or your users) if your product succeeds? Vision should be aspirational, durable, and concrete enough to be directional without being constraining.
The failure mode of vision statements is excessive abstraction: “be the leading platform for X” describes market position, not a future state. A stronger vision describes what is different for users: “every HR manager can complete their entire compliance workflow in under 30 minutes, without touching spreadsheets or waiting for IT.”
Strategy translates vision into a theory of how you get there from here. It answers: given where we are today, what are the specific choices we are making about which problems to solve first, which customer segments to prioritize, and which capabilities to build in what order?
Strategy is the hardest layer because it requires explicit prioritization — which means explicit deprioritization. A strategy that does not clearly rule anything out is not a strategy. It is a collection of things that are all true and compatible, without any real choice having been made.
Roadmap translates strategy into a time-bound investment plan. It answers: in the next 3–12 months, what will we build, in what sequence, and how does each item connect to the strategy?
The roadmap without strategy is a list of work without logic. Items are justified by customer requests, sales pipeline, or competitive gap rather than by a coherent theory of how they connect to the vision. The roadmap with strategy is a set of bets — each one connected to a strategic hypothesis, with enough specificity to be tested.
The Four Collapse Patterns
Collapse 1: Vision directly to roadmap (skipping strategy)
The product leader sets an inspiring vision. The team does not know how to translate it to work, so they fill the gap with their own interpretation — usually, they build what customers are asking for, which may or may not serve the vision. The roadmap looks busy. The vision does not get closer.
Collapse 2: Strategy as vision
Strategy is expressed in the same language as vision: directional, aspirational, without specific choices. “We will focus on enterprise customers while maintaining our SMB base” is not strategy — it is a statement of competing priorities without resolution. When everything is a priority, nothing is.
Collapse 3: Roadmap as strategy
The strategy document is a list of initiatives planned for the next 12 months. It answers “what” but not “why.” When circumstances change — a competitor makes a move, a large customer churns, the market shifts — the team does not know how to adapt the roadmap because they do not know what theory of the business the roadmap was serving.
Collapse 4: Strategy as a document, not a decision
The strategy is written beautifully, shared widely, and then effectively ignored as daily prioritization decisions are made on other grounds. The strategy exists as a communication artifact, not as a decision-making tool. The roadmap is built through the normal political and operational pressures, with the strategy consulted occasionally as justification rather than as a guide.
The Connective Tissue
What prevents the collapse? Three specific practices:
Strategy documents that contain explicit choices: A good strategy document includes a “where we will and will not invest” section that is specific enough to make real decisions. Not “focus on enterprise” but: “We will invest in capabilities that enable customers with 200–2,000 employees to replace their existing [legacy category] solution. We will not invest in capabilities specific to companies below 50 employees or above 5,000 employees in this phase.” This is specific enough to evaluate roadmap items against.
Traceability from roadmap to strategy: Each significant roadmap item should trace to a specific strategic choice. The planning conversation should include: “Which strategic priority does this serve?” If the answer is “all of them” or “customer demand,” the item is not strategy-driven. If the answer is “this builds the enterprise workflow capability that is our primary expansion path,” the item is anchored.
Quarterly strategy review separate from roadmap review: The strategy should be reviewed independently of the roadmap — asking whether the strategic choices made 90 days ago still hold, and whether the evidence from the past quarter (customer insight, competitive movement, market data) requires any updates. This review should happen before roadmap planning, not alongside it.
A Note on Ambiguity at the Strategy Layer
The discomfort of real strategy is that it requires making choices before you are certain. The product leader who wants more data before committing to a strategic direction will always be able to find reasons to wait. The strategy that cannot be made until everything is known will never be made.
The right relationship with ambiguity at the strategy layer: make the best strategic choice you can with the information you have, articulate clearly what assumptions it rests on, and define what evidence would cause you to revise it. Then execute with conviction while staying genuinely open to revision.
This is harder than it sounds. The two common failure modes are false conviction (committing to a strategy and ignoring contradicting evidence) and chronic ambivalence (never committing because certainty is always just out of reach).
The leaders who build great products hold the middle: strong commitment to a direction, high curiosity about evidence, and genuine willingness to update when the assumptions prove wrong.