The roadmap looks beautiful. Color-coded swimlanes. Dependencies mapped out. Milestones at regular intervals. Quarterly targets aligned with annual OKRs.
It’s perfect. And it’s fiction.
Two weeks from now, something will change. A customer request, a technical discovery, a strategic pivot. The roadmap will need updating. Then it will need updating again. And again.
Meanwhile, the actual work sits waiting while you plan how to plan it.
Plans Are Guesses
Every plan contains assumptions. Estimates of how long things take. Beliefs about what customers want. Predictions about what the market will do.
These assumptions are guesses. Some informed, some hopeful, most wrong in ways you can’t predict.
Roadmaps hide this uncertainty behind precision. Exact dates. Specific deliverables. Dependencies mapped to the hour. The precision is comforting but illusory.
Reality doesn’t care about your plan. It unfolds messily, revealing information you couldn’t have had when planning. The only honest response is to adapt - which means the plan was always temporary.
Planning Theater
Some planning is necessary. But much of what organizations call “planning” is performance.
Sprint ceremonies that take hours. Roadmap presentations that impress stakeholders. Estimation poker that creates false precision. Dependency mapping that becomes obsolete before the ink dries.
This isn’t planning. It’s planning theater - the appearance of control in a fundamentally uncontrollable situation.
The theater serves purposes. It creates alignment. It gives stakeholders something to approve. It makes everyone feel like they know what’s coming. But it doesn’t actually improve outcomes. Sometimes it degrades them by consuming time that could go to actual work.
Ship, Then Adjust
The alternative is straightforward: ship something, learn from it, adjust.
Not “move fast and break things” - that phrase justified too much recklessness. More like “ship carefully and learn constantly.” Do small work, see what happens, respond to reality.
This requires less planning, not none. You still need direction. You still need priorities. But you need them lightweight, updated in minutes not meetings, and held loosely.
Kanman supports this with drag-and-drop prioritization. Your roadmap is your project order. Changing priorities means dragging projects up or down. No ceremony, no slide deck, no realignment meetings.
Adaptability Beats Rigor
Rigid planning works in stable environments. When you know exactly what needs building, when requirements are fixed, when nothing unexpected happens - detailed upfront planning makes sense.
That’s not the environment most of us work in.
In real work, requirements shift. Customers change their minds. Technologies surprise you. Team capacity fluctuates. The ground moves while you’re standing on it.
In this environment, adaptability beats rigor. The team that can reprioritize in an afternoon outperforms the team that needs a sprint boundary. The individual who reorders their task list by gut feeling outperforms the one waiting for the next planning session.
Planning should enable adaptation, not prevent it.
What Minimum Planning Looks Like
Here’s what planning actually needs:
Direction. Where are we headed? This can be a sentence, not a document.
Priority order. What’s most important right now? A ranked list, not a matrix.
Current focus. What are we actively working on? The things you’ve started and intend to finish.
That’s it. Everything else - estimates, timelines, dependencies, capacity calculations - is optional overhead that may or may not help.
Kanman keeps just these essentials. Your projects show direction and priority through their order. Your active tasks show current focus. There’s nothing else because nothing else is necessary.
When Plans Do Matter
Some contexts need more structure:
Coordination dependencies. When Team A’s work blocks Team B, you need some shared timeline understanding. But this is coordination, not detailed upfront planning.
External commitments. When you’ve promised a customer a feature by a date, you need to track toward that date. But the internal path to get there can stay flexible.
Large initiatives. When work spans months and multiple teams, some structure prevents chaos. But even then, the structure should be minimal and adaptive.
The principle holds: plan enough to coordinate, not enough to constrain.
Shipping as Learning
The deepest problem with upfront planning is that it assumes you know things you can’t.
How long will this take? You don’t know until you’ve done similar work. What will customers want? You don’t know until they use it. What will break? You don’t know until you push to production.
Every shipped piece of work generates knowledge. Features reveal customer preferences. Bugs reveal system weaknesses. Timelines reveal estimation accuracy.
This knowledge improves future work. But it only comes from shipping - not from planning to ship.
The Anti-Roadmap
Kanman’s “Screw plans. Get it done.” tagline isn’t anti-planning. It’s anti-planning-theater.
Real planning takes five minutes. Look at what’s in progress. Decide what’s most important. Start working.
The roadmap that matters is the project list. The strategy that matters is the priority order. The commitment that matters is the thing you’re actively building.
Everything else is noise dressed as signal.
Ready to skip the planning theater? Replaces roadmaps with simple priority lists. Drag, drop, ship. Kanman - annual workspace subscriptions. €4 / month for individuals, €10 per seat / month.
Marco Kerwitz
Founder of kanman.de