The Public and Secret Roadmap
Split your roadmap into what users ask for and what only you can see — the wins come from the second
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
Rather than a single roadmap, run two. The public roadmap is everything users have requested — legitimate, but every competitor has the same list, so executing it only wins at the margins. The secret roadmap is ideas nobody asked for, derived from your unique vantage point on the user, problem, and technology; users wouldn't even know to request them, but once shown they change user behavior permanently. The game-changing wins come from the secret roadmap.
Origin
Gaurav Misra's product methodology at Captions; secret-roadmap ideas are sourced through company-wide quarterly brainstorms.
Core principles
- 01Any feature a user asks you for, they're also asking every competitor for — so it can't be a durable differentiator
- 02Winning on the public roadmap is only winning on prioritization and execution, at the margins
- 03The best products change user behavior: show people a new way, and once they try it they never go back
- 04Secret-roadmap ideas come from a unique vantage point on the user, problem space, and technology — and are never discussed publicly before launch
How to run it
- 1
Build the public roadmap
Collect all user-requested features across feedback surfaces, prioritize by reach and market, and execute one at a time.
Watch out Assume every competitor has this same list and is prioritizing it too — treat it as table stakes, not advantage.
- 2
Generate the secret roadmap
Run company-wide quarterly brainstorms — engineering, recruiting, marketing, everyone — to surface ideas nobody would ever request. Vote and rank the ideas.
Pro tip Including non-product functions turns the noise everyone absorbs on social media into a shared idea pool.
- 3
Filter for behavior change
Have the product team assess feasibility and technology, keeping ideas that could revolutionize how something is used — where once a user tries the new way they never revert.
- 4
Launch silently
Never talk about secret-roadmap items publicly; announce and ship them straight to users and observe the effect.
Pro tip Naming it the 'secret' roadmap itself raises the team's interest and ambition for what goes on it.
In the wild
An early secret-roadmap idea from a brainstorm: automatically shifting a speaker's eyes to look at the camera when they're reading from an off-screen script. Captions built it first, partnering with Nvidia (who initially didn't see why it was needed).
→ A huge success; the demo ad went viral in nearly every language, still gets millions of views, and the feature has since been copied across many apps.
Common mistakes
Running only a request-driven roadmap
If you only build what users ask for, you build the same thing as every competitor and never produce a game-changing differentiator.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product leaders and founders in competitive categories who need durable differentiation beyond feature parity
Not ideal for
Teams without deep, unique insight into their users — secret-roadmap bets from a shallow vantage point are just guesses
From the transcript
“we have what we think of as the public road map this is basically what people have asked us for”
“if a user is asking us for it they're asking everybody for it and every team has essentially more or less the same list”
“we have a second road map which we think of as a secret road map so this is a road map that nobody asked for…”
“people are doing things one way if we're able to show them another way and once they try it they never go back that's what…”
“a lot of times the biggest wins will come from the secret road map”
From the episode
How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy
Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions)