Charter, Goals, Roadmap: The Three Documents
Every level of the org needs three docs — mission/strategy, goals, roadmap — written top-down
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 87%
A minimal, durable document set that every function and every team should maintain throughout its life: a Charter (mission, vision, strategy), Goals (what you're aiming to do and how you'll measure success), and a Roadmap (what you're shipping). Teams tend to build these bottom-up starting from the roadmap, but Eeke de Milliano argues you should start top-down, and that the time horizon of the charter stretches as the company matures.
Origin
Eeke de Milliano, Head of Product at Retool, distilled this from watching Stripe and Retool try to figure out process at different stages.
Core principles
- 01Three documents are enough at any stage: charter, goals, roadmap
- 02Every level needs its own set — the whole function and each team within it
- 03Teams naturally work bottom-up from the roadmap, but top-down is worth the effort
- 04The charter's time horizon expands with company maturity
How to run it
- 1
Write the Charter first (top-down)
Define the mission, vision, and strategy before anything else. Resist the natural pull to start from the roadmap — start from the top and derive downward.
Pro tip Teams early on start with 'what are all the things we're gonna ship' and back into a charter; forcing top-down produces better alignment.
- 2
Set Goals and success measures
Define what you're aiming to do and how you'll measure success, flowing from the charter.
- 3
Build the Roadmap of what you'll ship
Lay out the concrete things you're shipping, derived from the goals and charter rather than driving them.
- 4
Match the charter's horizon to your maturity
Set the charter's time horizon to your stage: a pre-PMF company's charter looks ~three months out because it can't see further; a humming, established company's charter horizon may be a decade.
Pro tip Replicate all three documents at both the whole-function level and within each individual team.
Watch out A pre-PMF team writing a decade-long charter is fooling itself — it can't see that far.
In the wild
Eeke de Milliano notes that a very early company without PMF should still have a charter, but its horizon should be about three months because it can't look further; a company that is humming along has a charter horizon of maybe a decade.
→ The same document set stays useful across a company's whole life by flexing its time horizon rather than changing its structure.
Common mistakes
Working bottom-up from the roadmap
Starting with the list of things to ship and reverse-engineering a charter produces weaker strategy than deriving the roadmap from a charter and goals.
Setting a horizon that ignores your stage
A pre-PMF team writing a decade-out charter, or a mature team stuck on three-month thinking, mismatches ambition to visibility and wastes the exercise.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product and function leaders standardizing planning artifacts across teams at any company stage
Not ideal for
Solo founders or micro-teams where three formal documents per level is more overhead than signal
From the transcript
“there's just a set of documents that are like really really valuable that every sort of like I guess level of the organization should have…”
“those those documents to me are the charter so uh what is your mission your vision and your strategy the goals what are you aiming…”
“teams often work their way from like the bottom up versus top down like they start with a road map”
“it's really really worth it to like start from the top down”
“if you're very early on you don't have pmf like you should have a charter but your Charter should be like three months in the…”
From the episode
How to foster innovation and big thinking
Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe)