3 min read
Predictability is the thing silently killing your product roadmap
Marty Cagan's SVPG piece reframes a familiar debate: the real enemy of good products isn't output, it's the organizational hunger for predictability. Here's what that means for small teams.
By intermac
The argument that outcomes matter more than output is one of the most repeated ideas in product management. Marty Cagan has been making it for over a decade. Almost nobody disagrees with it out loud. And yet, as his latest SVPG piece points out, we have never had more abundant output and scarcer outcomes than we do right now.
His reframe is the useful part: the real trade-off isn't outcomes versus output. It's outcomes versus predictability. Companies don't deprioritize outcomes because they think shipping features is the goal. They do it because predictability is what the organization actually rewards — what executives can report, what stakeholders can hold teams to, what gives everyone a feeling of control. Outcomes require admitting uncertainty. Predictability lets you avoid that conversation indefinitely.
Why small teams aren't immune
It's tempting to read this as a large-company problem. SAFe, program increments, quarterly roadmap reviews locked in six months early — that's enterprise dysfunction, not ours. But the same instinct operates at any scale.
A two-person studio can still fill a roadmap with untested ideas and ship against a self-imposed timeline, calling it discipline when it's actually avoidance. The desire to feel like you know what you're building next week, next month, next quarter — and to be able to tell customers or early users something concrete — is deeply human. It doesn't require a bureaucracy to take hold.
Cagan quotes Henrik Kniberg's blunt formulation: "100% predictability = 0% innovation." That's not a knock against planning. It's a description of what you're trading away when a fixed plan becomes the primary commitment.
What you actually have to give up
Choosing outcomes means accepting that most ideas on a roadmap won't work as written. That's not pessimism — it's what the craft of product discovery is designed around. You run smaller experiments, you find out sooner, you change course before you've built the wrong thing at full fidelity.
What that requires, as Cagan puts it, is humility. Specifically: understanding what you can't know yet, and resisting the pressure to paper over that uncertainty with a confident-sounding plan. Steve Jobs described the belief that a great idea is 90% of the work as a "disease" that ruins companies. The roadmap full of untested assumptions is that disease in spreadsheet form.
The practical implication for teams building products is straightforward, even if it's uncomfortable. Before a feature goes on a timeline, there should be some evidence — however lightweight — that it addresses a real problem in a way people will actually use. A date attached to an untested idea isn't a plan; it's a bet dressed up as a commitment.
AI makes this more urgent, not less
Cagan notes that AI is accelerating exactly this dynamic. It's now easier than ever to produce output quickly, which means the gap between what teams ship and what actually creates value is widening, not closing. Speed without discovery is just a faster way to build the wrong thing.
For anyone building software products right now, the honest question isn't "are we shipping enough?" It's "are we learning fast enough to know what's worth shipping?" Those are different questions, and conflating them is where roadmaps go to die.
Sources
- Predictability vs Outcomes (original)
- Found via the TLDR newsletter