PRODUCT ROADMAP: NOW / NEXT / LATER
Original ShowMeYourSaaS worksheet — October 26, 2026
Guide: https://showmeyoursaas.com/articles/product-roadmap/

ROADMAP PURPOSE
Product and audience:
Customer problem and strategic objective:
Roadmap audience: internal / public / other
Version, owner, and review trigger:
What Now, Next, and Later mean for this team:
Capacity reserved for support, reliability, and maintenance:

OUTCOME CARD — DUPLICATE FOR EACH INITIATIVE
Horizon:
Customer and job:
Observed problem and permitted source reference:
Intended outcome:
Current hypothesis and contradictory evidence:
Confidence and unresolved questions:
Smallest next action:
Dependencies and constraints:
Owner:
Date label: committed / target / review only / no date
Reason for a real date and who owns that commitment:
Acceptance evidence:
Delivery-plan reference, when ready:
Next review trigger:

ORIGINAL FICTIONAL BRIEFBOARD EXAMPLE — CONSTRUCTED INPUTS
Intended outcome: help a freelancer receive a complete first client response
without repeated assistance. The evidence below is a teaching scenario, not
findings from a real product or research study.

NOW
Problem: failed brief submission should preserve entered work.
Action: reproduce the failure and deliver a bounded recovery change.
Evidence needed: a regression check and an observed successful retry.
Acceptance: fields survive simulated failure; retry creates no duplicate record.
Date: no shipping commitment supplied by this example.

NEXT
Problem: clients should understand the information being requested.
Action: compare the current invitation with a clearer explanation.
Evidence needed: recent recipient observations and complete-response counts.
Decision: select a change after the underlying obstacle is understood.

LATER
Opportunity: studios may need several people to review a brief.
Action: investigate roles, ownership, and recurring collaboration needs.
Evidence needed: why the current single-owner workflow is insufficient.
Status: exploratory; no feature or release date promised.

DATE AND DEPENDENCY REVIEW
Committed date and its basis:
Tentative target and uncertainty:
Research review date (not a release date):
Dependency: what must be true, who can establish it, and by when if applicable:
What is removed or deferred to make room for another commitment:

INTERNAL AND PUBLIC VIEWS
Which details are appropriate to share publicly:
Private customer references or internal constraints kept in the internal view:
How both views stay consistent when an initiative changes:

CHANGE LOG
Date / evidence / decision / work paused or removed / owner / affected views /
next review.
An item can change or leave the roadmap; it does not have to progress through
all three horizons. Source explanations are linked in the guide.