Full steam ahead! Will the current build lead to another stepping stone in the direction of the mission or off a cliff? Who knows?
Disproof
A pool of things you can’t build now, but that building this enables. Doesn’t have to be linear, doesn’t have to be a roadmap
Consequences
Each option past what you’re doing now will have a huge amount of probabilities assigned to it that only coalesce once you’ve shipped the current thing
If you’re betting on a totally linear path, you will at some point have to think very quickly
If you’re betting the farm on the totally linear path, you may lose the farm
If you’ve not thought about a path at all, you could build something that actually kills your ability to progress
Your users get used to a local maxima
The next product conflicts with it
UX creep, plurality of paradigms, no space for expansion, trained users to expect the wrong thing, etc
Causes
Likelier in the absence of a dedicated strategist; even if you’ve got the perfect team capable of distributed strategic thinking - they can still get distracted by all other processes that go into the build and fail to do this thinking
However, even when ‘strategic’ thinking has been done and you have a roadmap, it has been imagined statically
Nobody has fully reasoned through the opportunity implications of each product or feature being built and operated
If you’re too busy chasing funding - investors look for companies with a future not just a present
Approaches
If you don’t have some kind picture of which stepping stones that get you towards the mission, which you can reach and which ones you can’t, and which is the shortest route, start there.
Each iteration materially shifts the relationship you have with your users and what you can get them to do. It also alters your position in the market, the tech level of your company and the dynamics of the businesses operationalised around it.
These things are rarely linear and it’s ok for it to look like a cloud. What WILL help to organise it is looking at each stepping stone and asking:
What needs to be reached first before this works?
What does reaching here change about my relationships and my company’s organisation?
What opportunities do I have from here?
What opportunities do I give up?
If product leadership exists, it needs to stop doing busy work and lead this thinking.
If product leadership doesn’t exist, someone is going to have to make it happen, even if they’re not the one doing the thinking