roadmap-narrative

Roadmap Narrative Skill

Convert a ranked list of product initiatives into a clear, strategic narrative that connects individual items to company goals and communicates a coherent product direction.

Working from a brief

You will often get a short brief (a few themes, an audience) without a full initiative list or OKRs. Always deliver the complete narrative anyway — do not stop to ask questions and do not leave bracketed placeholders like [Theme Name]. Where detail is missing, infer specific, realistic themes, initiatives, and metrics from the brief and the domain, and mark any inferred fact or number as (assumed — confirm). Fill every section with concrete content, not template brackets.

Inputs (infer any not provided — label assumptions)

• Prioritised initiative list (with rough timelines or quarters)
• Company OKRs or strategic priorities (to connect roadmap to company goals)
• Audience (all-hands, board, investors, sales team — changes tone and depth)
• Items explicitly NOT on the roadmap (optional but strengthens credibility)

Where this sits — the spine's terminus

Last in the product-decision spine: **/assumption-mapper → /prd-template →

/rice-prioritisation → roadmap-narrative. It receives the ranked initiatives with

their RICE scores** and turns them into a theme-level story leadership can repeat. It

adds no new priorities — the ranking is upstream's job; this skill narrates it. Theme

and provenance are defined once in

[docs/craft/product-decisions.md](../../docs/craft/product-decisions.md): a roadmap

narrates in themes, and it may not launder an upstream [hunch] into a confident promise.

The loop

The failure mode is a narrative that overstates certainty or orphans an initiative.

Phase 1 sets the honesty ceiling; every later claim inherits it.

1. Inherit priorities and provenance — don't re-rank. Read the RICE output and the

OKRs. Carry each initiative's confidence through: a low-confidence bet is narrated as

a bet ("we believe"), not a commitment ("we will").

Done when: every claim's certainty matches its upstream provenance tag, and no

[hunch] has been promoted to a promise.

1. Group into 2–3 themes that ladder to strategy. Themes are the unit of the story;

RICE rows are their evidence. For each theme name the problem it addresses, the

customer it serves, and the metric it moves (the PRDs' success metrics).

Done when: every ranked initiative maps to exactly one theme — no orphans; an

orphan is either a missing theme or a flagged narrative gap, never ignored.

1. Draw the progression. Write the quarter/half arc that shows how earlier work sets

up later work — why this order, not just this list. Then the executive summary:

3–4 sentences a non-technical stakeholder can repeat verbatim.

Done when: the sequence has a stated reason beyond RICE order, and the summary

survives being repeated by someone who wasn't in the room.

1. **Name what's not on the roadmap.** The deliberate no's are half the strategy;

state them, so the narrative reads as choices made, not everything attempted.

Done when: the "not now" section exists and each entry has a one-line why.

Output Structure

Product Roadmap: [Quarter/Half/Year]

Strategic Context: [1 paragraph: market moment, key challenge, our response]

Theme 1: [Theme Name]

• Strategic rationale
• Initiatives included
• Primary metric impacted
• Dependencies

[Repeat for each theme]

What's Not on the Roadmap (and Why):

[2-3 items with rationale — shows strategic discipline, not just prioritisation]

Executive Summary (shareable):

[3-4 sentences that could be shared in an all-hands or board update]

Tone Guidelines

• Write for a CFO, not an engineer
• Lead with customer outcomes, not features
• Be honest about what's NOT on the roadmap and why

Timeline, drawn

When the themes have a sequence or dates, also render the roadmap as a Mermaid Gantt chart so the shape of the plan is visible (it renders live in the playground; with real ISO dates it also exports to a calendar .ics). Use section per theme/quarter and mark key checkpoints as milestones.

gantt
    title Roadmap
    dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD
    section Theme 1
        Initiative      :2026-07-01, 30d
        Checkpoint      :milestone, 2026-07-31, 0d
    section Theme 2
        Initiative      :2026-08-01, 45d

Scoring Rubric (0–40)

Score any output of this skill before handing it over; 32+ is ship-quality.

| Dimension | 0 | 5 | 10 |

|---|---|---|---|

| Thematic coherence | A feature list with dates relabelled as a "narrative"; no themes | Themes exist but one or more initiatives are orphaned without being flagged | Every initiative maps to a theme; anything that doesn't fit is explicitly flagged as a narrative gap, not smuggled in |

| Causal progression | Quarters are a chronological listing with no connection between them | Sequence is stated but the "Q1 enables Q2 because…" reasoning is missing or asserted without evidence | Each period visibly enables the next, with the causal dependency argued in prose and reflected in the timeline |

| Strategic candour | No "what's not on the roadmap" section | One exclusion with thin rationale ("not a priority right now") | ≥2 named exclusions with defensible strategic rationale — including at least one idea someone actually wants |

| Executive repeatability | Jargon-heavy; no standalone summary; a CFO couldn't retell any of it | Summary exists but is too long, too technical, or reads as compression rather than a story | 3–4 sentence summary a non-technical stakeholder could repeat correctly after one reading, zero engineering jargon |

Quality Checks

• [ ] Every initiative in the input maps to a strategic theme
• [ ] The executive summary can stand alone and be repeated correctly after one reading
• [ ] Progression narrative shows causal links between quarters (not just chronological listing)
• [ ] "What's not on the roadmap" section includes at least 2 items with clear rationale
• [ ] Language throughout is free of engineering jargon — tested by asking: "could a CFO repeat this?"

Anti-Patterns

• [ ] Do not produce a list of features with dates and call it a narrative — every initiative must connect to a strategic theme
• [ ] Do not omit the "what's not on the roadmap" section — without it, the narrative lacks strategic discipline
• [ ] Do not write progression as a chronological list — show causal links between quarters (Q1 enables Q2 because…)
• [ ] Do not write the executive summary last and treat it as a summary — write it as the version stakeholders will repeat
• [ ] Do not let orphaned initiatives appear without a theme — either create a theme or flag the gap explicitly