Roadmaps are promises: how Orbital stopped breaking them

Two years ago Orbital’s roadmap was a slide with forty items and three colours. Customers saw it, sales quoted it, and the company delivered about half of it in any given quarter. Everyone knew the slide was fiction, so nobody trusted it, so every team kept its own shadow plan.

Grace replaced it with something smaller and stricter: a public list of no more than six commitments a quarter, each with an owner, a date range and a plain statement of what would be true for customers when it was done. Everything else became a bet, and was labelled as one. The first quarter was uncomfortable. By the fourth, Orbital kept 92 per cent of its commitments and sales had stopped promising features on calls.

This talk covers the format, the arguments it caused, the quarters it failed, and how to introduce it without waiting for the whole company’s permission.

What you will take away

• A commitment format that separates promises from bets, with real examples from Orbital
• How to say no to a large customer without losing the account
• The review rhythm that keeps a short list honest through a quarter