Developing and sticking to a product roadmap - a schedule of planned product developments - is challenging. Mostly because you cannot predict the future, especially in a responsive, growing company.

In the past at Zapnito, we would draw up a big spreadsheet of planned developments in line with our vision, locking in budgets for the work. And if we deviated from the roadmap it was considered failure. And the bad kind of failure... not the agile kind.

But deviate we did, in order to respond to our customers and our market. Consequently we have built great, valuable features that may not have been on our roadmap but which are certainly in line with our vision. Far from being a failure.

More recently therefore we are finding that you can be agile and have a plan. That you can be customer-responsive and be the experts on what the market needs. That you can embrace new, unexpected ideas and drive towards a vision. It's a balancing act of course and we continue to work hard to get that balance right.

We still have a product roadmap but it's a guide not an itinerary. We are excited to see where it will take us.