Roadmap Narrative Skill

Convert a ranked list of product initiatives into a clear, strategic narrative that connects individual items to company goals and communicates a coherent product direction.

Working from a brief

You will often get a short brief (a few themes, an audience) without a full initiative list or OKRs. Always deliver the complete narrative anyway — do not stop to ask questions and do not leave bracketed placeholders like [Theme Name]. Where detail is missing, infer specific, realistic themes, initiatives, and metrics from the brief and the domain, and mark any inferred fact or number as (assumed — confirm). Fill every section with concrete content, not template brackets.

Inputs (infer any not provided — label assumptions)

• Prioritised initiative list (with rough timelines or quarters)
• Company OKRs or strategic priorities (to connect roadmap to company goals)
• Audience (all-hands, board, investors, sales team — changes tone and depth)
• Items explicitly NOT on the roadmap (optional but strengthens credibility)

Where this sits — the spine's terminus

Last in the product-decision spine: /assumption-mapper → /prd-template → /rice-prioritisation → roadmap-narrative. It receives the ranked initiatives with their RICE scores and turns them into a theme-level story leadership can repeat. It adds no new priorities — the ranking is upstream's job; this skill narrates it. Theme and provenance are defined once in docs/craft/product-decisions.md: a roadmap narrates in themes, and it may not launder an upstream [hunch] into a confident promise.

The loop

The failure mode is a narrative that overstates certainty or orphans an initiative. Phase 1 sets the honesty ceiling; every later claim inherits it.

1. Inherit priorities and provenance — don't re-rank. Read the RICE output and the OKRs. Carry each initiative's confidence through: a low-confidence bet is narrated as a bet ("we believe"), not a commitment ("we will"). Done when: every claim's certainty matches its upstream provenance tag, and no [hunch] has been promoted to a promise.
2. Group into 2–3 themes that ladder to strategy. Themes are the unit of the story; RICE rows are their evidence. For each theme name the problem it addresses, the customer it serves, and the metric it moves (the PRDs' success metrics). Done when: every ranked initiative maps to exactly one theme — no orphans; an orphan is either a missing theme or a flagged narrative gap, never ignored.
3. Draw the progression. Write the quarter/half arc that shows how earlier work sets up later work — why this order, not just this list. Then the executive summary: 3–4 sentences a non-technical stakeholder can repeat verbatim. Done when: the sequence has a stated reason beyond RICE order, and the summary survives being repeated by someone who wasn't in the room.
4. Name what's not on the roadmap. The deliberate no's are half the strategy; state them, so the narrative reads as choices made, not everything attempted. Done when: the "not now" section exists and each entry has a one-line why.

Output Structure

Product Roadmap: [Quarter/Half/Year]

Strategic Context: [1 paragraph: market moment, key challenge, our response]

Theme 1: [Theme Name]

• Strategic rationale
• Initiatives included
• Primary metric impacted
• Dependencies

[Repeat for each theme]

What's Not on the Roadmap (and Why): [2-3 items with rationale — shows strategic discipline, not just prioritisation]

Executive Summary (shareable): [3-4 sentences that could be shared in an all-hands or board update]

Tone Guidelines

• Write for a CFO, not an engineer
• Lead with customer outcomes, not features
• Be honest about what's NOT on the roadmap and why

Timeline, drawn

When the themes have a sequence or dates, also render the roadmap as a Mermaid Gantt chart so the shape of the plan is visible (it renders live in the playground; with real ISO dates it also exports to a calendar .ics). Use section per theme/quarter and mark key checkpoints as milestones.

gantt
    title Roadmap
    dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD
    section Theme 1
        Initiative      :2026-07-01, 30d
        Checkpoint      :milestone, 2026-07-31, 0d
    section Theme 2
        Initiative      :2026-08-01, 45d

Scoring Rubric (0–40)

Score any output of this skill before handing it over; 32+ is ship-quality.

Quality Checks

• Every initiative in the input maps to a strategic theme
• The executive summary can stand alone and be repeated correctly after one reading
• Progression narrative shows causal links between quarters (not just chronological listing)
• "What's not on the roadmap" section includes at least 2 items with clear rationale
• Language throughout is free of engineering jargon — tested by asking: "could a CFO repeat this?"

Anti-Patterns

• Do not produce a list of features with dates and call it a narrative — every initiative must connect to a strategic theme
• Do not omit the "what's not on the roadmap" section — without it, the narrative lacks strategic discipline
• Do not write progression as a chronological list — show causal links between quarters (Q1 enables Q2 because…)
• Do not write the executive summary last and treat it as a summary — write it as the version stakeholders will repeat
• Do not let orphaned initiatives appear without a theme — either create a theme or flag the gap explicitly