A letter about shipping software without a growth team. Written on Sundays in Providence, Rhode Island, and sent to 8,412 people on Mondays.
We deleted the roadmap
Not the plan. The document. For two years we kept a quarterly roadmap that nobody outside the leadership channel read, and that got rewritten in week six every single quarter. In August we stopped publishing it and replaced it with a page listing the three things currently being built and who to ask about each.
Two things happened. Support stopped forwarding “is this coming?” emails to product, because customers could check. And the arguments moved earlier, to the point where something got added to the list, which is where they were useful.
The roadmap was not the plan. It was a performance of having one.
The thing we lost is a sense of sequence. Somebody asked in September whether the API came before or after billing, and the honest answer was that we did not know yet. That felt bad to say and was true.
Three things worth your Sunday
A working paper on team size and defect rate The effect shows up at seven people, not at ten. Thirty-one pages, worth skimming. How Basecamp prices without a sales team Old post, still the clearest thing written on flat pricing. A one file HTML profiler Drop a trace in, get a flame graph. No install, no account.Reader question
“How do you decide what not to build when everything is asked for by somebody?” — Marcus, Denver
We write the refusal down. Every “no” goes on a page with one line about why. After a year that page is more useful than the roadmap ever was, because patterns show up in it.
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Single HTML file. No external files, no build step.