Most software companies treat the roadmap like a state secret. It's understandable: a private roadmap preserves flexibility, avoids the optics of a missed date, and keeps competitors guessing. We publish ours anyway — what we're building now, what's next, and what we've explicitly declined. It's a deliberate choice, and the reasons say a lot about how we think a software company should relate to the people who depend on it.
A roadmap is a promise about your future, not just ours.
When you put your business on a platform, you're not buying what it does today — you're betting on where it's going. Hiding the roadmap asks you to make that bet blind, trusting vague reassurances from a sales call. Publishing it lets you make the bet with your eyes open: you can see whether the thing you need is coming, and decide accordingly. A platform that won't tell you where it's headed is asking for a commitment it won't reciprocate.
If we're asking you to build your business on us, the least we can do is tell you where we're taking it.
What we give up by publishing it.
Let's be honest about the costs, because they're real. A public roadmap means public misses — when something slips, everyone sees it slip. It means competitors know our priorities. It means we can't quietly abandon a stated direction without acknowledging it. Those are genuine downsides, and we accept them, because the alternative — managing optics by keeping you in the dark — is exactly the kind of vendor behavior we built this company to be the opposite of.
The upside we didn't fully expect.
The surprise was how much the public roadmap improved the product. When customers can see and vote on what's next, we get an honest signal about what actually matters instead of guessing from sales anecdotes. When we publish the “no” column too, we have fewer of the same conversations and attract customers who want what we're actually building. Building in the open turned out to be a better way to build, not just a more honest one.
Transparency is easy to claim and expensive to practice. Publishing the roadmap — misses, priorities, refusals and all — is one of the places we try to pay that cost rather than just claim the virtue. You're trusting us with your business. The least we can do is build it where you can watch.