AI Broke Product Planning and There Is No Obvious Way to Fix That
As a major PM responsibility, roadmap planning has become controversial over the years. As much as I enjoy short-sight planning for the next quarter, I hate yearly roadmap planning.
The latter became a cargo-cult ritual that starts with whispering in October and, as a giant wave, hits everyone in a product organization, continuing in November until final approval in December each year. It sounds straightforward: prioritize a list of initiatives and put them on a timeline. The trick is to make it not look like a commitment.
There are probably hundreds of books dedicated to that topic. The only thing I've learned over half a decade: despite the effort you put into planning, it will end up in the trash before Q1 ends.
With all the unknowns driving a roadmap to a nonsensical outcome and keeping higher management under the illusion of control, we now have AI in the equation. It accelerates development output, pushing the bottleneck further down the line. With that change, estimating the whole thing becomes even more problematic.