The goal of this new model is to eliminate the problems with public roadmaps while giving a framework for founders to use that gives the community realistic expectations, keeps them engaged and up to date on the project progress but isn’t too burdensome on the team.

Public Roadmaps:

Anyone who’s spent a minute in crypto has seen a public roadmap. It’s the plan for the next four quarters for a specific project. These are good because they illustrate the goals and milestones of the project. They also create a lot of hype which can be good for selling your NFT but also can lead to an overexcited community that may have unrealistic expectations.

The key factor in future success here is whether a team creates a realistic plan for moving forward or overpromises merely to create hype and then either abandons the project (rugs it) or just prays they can meet their grandiose goals. The former is definitely a better strategy than the later for anyone who’s not a grifter.

Why They Suck

There’s a lot of ways this can backfire so I’ll just list a few.

• Creates constant questions from the public about the status of every point
• Creates stress on the team/community managers to answer these questions and communicate progress constantly
• If you miss or change a milestone it’s glaring on your roadmap that usually is on your main website and creates bad optics
• If you need to adjust the roadmap (like every startup ever has to all the time) you create a ton of bad PR and additional distractions for the team as people cry about it on twitter and in your discord even if you give valid reasons as to why
• And on and on

A Proposed New Framework

Write a litepaper when you start to communicate the vision, goals, and general plan of how to execute. Give rough timelines but it doesn’t need to be a specific list of each feature you’re doing for each quarter.

In my opinion, this also helps frame the starting point and doesn’t make it seem like you should be beholden to everything in your litepaper. This is unlike public roadmaps where a decision you made 9 months ago when you made this arbitrary roadmap can come back to bite you in the ass because certain project dynamics or overall market dynamics have changed and you need to alter the plan. Anyone with a brain knows that as time goes on your project will inevitably adjust as you get feedback from the market so this litepaper really is just your initial vision and plan.

Then do the following:

• Put out quarterly roadmaps limited to only the upcoming quarter and do this via a community call you treat like a mini board meeting
• This roadmap is just for the next quarter not the year
• Make it high level; we plan to do X, Y, and Z features this upcoming quarter
• Review what you did last quarter on the call first
• If you missed or changed any deliverables on the last quarter roadmap, just say why.
• We did A & B features but missed/changed C because; QA took longer than expected, we pivoted feature C due to market feedback mid quarter, 1 key artist got sick… or whatever the reason is
• Then put out your next quarter roadmap; We plan to finish C and do D,E,F features. Release it in the Discord so it’s for the community and people seeking it out. It doesn’t need to be front and center on your website. That’s clearly someone who is using it for hype rather than accurate planning & effective communication to stakeholders
• Next remind people of some key metrics or goals for end of year or some time a few quarters down the road - this is the medium term stuff for your project
• After that, remind people that all this stuff in the upcoming quarter, and the medium term goals is to work towards your north star vision - this is the long term stuff
• Take Q&A in the discord
• Put the docs in a roadmap update channel with a recording of the meeting
• Sign off and tell everyone, see you next quarter

After that, anyone who asks in the discord, “what’s going on?” or anything about the status of development should just be directed there to listen to the meeting and see the current quarter roadmap.

Additionally, any project with investors that isn’t bootstrapped has to essentially do this for the board anyways so you can just repurpose material and take out anything confidential or sensitive to make it even easier on the team.

TLDR;

When roadmaps are realistic from the get go, the team communicates in a consistent clear manner to the community about their decisions, teams treat NFT owners like they would investors, and you give measured quarter by quarter milestones rather than year long overhyped roadmaps, you will reduce community induced headaches, see much more success as a team and garner a better relationship with your holders.