I’ve read two (unrelated) things about roadmaps in the last 24 hours, and they’re both great in different ways.

Firstly, James Higgot posted some gratitude about a reference to the NHS app roadmap he is rightly proud of:

Nice to see my colleagues in NHS.UK called out (in a good way!) in this post about public sector roadmaps.

— James Higgott (@jiggott.bsky.social) 2024-07-17T15:25:45.334Z

And secondly, Dave Briggs shared a post linking to the Local Stuff for Local Gov People blog, which is powered by minimalist blogging platform bearblog.dev.

If you're someone who is thinking about starting to blog but struggling to make the leap, this is such a good example of a new blogger just going for it – a real inspiration! localstuffforlocalgovpeople.bearblog.dev/blog/

— Dave Briggs (@da.vebrig.gs) 2024-07-18T10:13:53.677Z

Bearblog have a roadmap of their own, which is driven by its users who can suggest and vote on what features they want to see. As well as publicly sharing what is ‘under consideration’, ‘planned’, ‘in progress’ and ‘completed’, it goes a step further and shows what blearblog won’t do. As a group of people once said, agile software development is “the art of maximizing the amount of work not done“.

It is easy for product managers to add features to their backlog. It can be tricky to prioritise those features. And it can be very difficult to publicly justify things you’re not going to do (and not just kick it down the backlog for Future You to deal with.

More of this transparency please!