| If we really want to stick with the analogy, we could treat the map as not fully discovered. In Age of Empires, a historical strategy game, you start with a few villagers and ,in some campaigns, an end destination - a relic to acquire or an empire to conquer. This is similar to the founders starting a company with some idea of what the end result looks like. But the villagers can only see a little ahead from their current position in each direction. So they have to go exploring. As they explore, they may discover unnavigable terrain like cliffs or rivers that they have to cross in the direct path to their destination. They may also come across hostile armies on the way. As startups build their first version of the product, they too would have explored a portion of their domain before deciding on the roadmap. They encounter competing products with the same set of features which they'll have to overcome with more features or better versions of the same features. They too hit dead ends and pivot into a related product or service. Another key feature of the game is that you don't get permanent visibility into the areas of the map that you have explored. You'll need to have watch towers or a portion of your army there to know what the rest of the empires are planning and how the area is developing. Startups too cannot claim expertise in a field for long without constantly keeping up with new developments. But founders can choose to evolve their roadmap to keep them more attuned to certain domains and for more outfield developments, they may not want/ need to revise their product roadmap. |
Fog of war is very applicable to product development. And a roadmap is never a 100% correct representation of course. One can strive.