Steve Blank's idea (4 Steps) is that a roadmap enables you to ship a breathtakingly low quality product, because it is understood as the first installment in a

Steve Blank's idea (4 Steps) is that a roadmap enables you to ship a breathtakingly low quality product, because it is understood as the first installment in a bigger plan. Customers are really buying the vision, not the initial buggy, slow, undocumented, awkward, feature-missing piece of garbage you shipped in the first version (which is version 0.1, not 1.0) But why are you shipping rubbish? It's part of getting going as quickly as possible, and iterating and learning. When real people start to use it for real tasks, you'll learn that the missing feature A that keeps you awake is not actually missed; but feature B that you didn't even think of is crucial. There are other advantages: if it truly is an unmet need, people will be so happy to solve some of it, that they won't care about the rest. water when you're dry etc. By shipping early, you'll also be building your market presence (for a new product, the first part of which isn't the quality of it, nor whether it works, but what is it). The part about learning above is more crucial than you might think: knowledge of secondary user problems that no one else knows about (because they only become clear when people start using a solution) is a competitive advantage. The information is also precisely customized to your product, which makes it easier for you to absorb than for competitors with a different product and approach (which will have its own, slightly different, problems). You have a head start before other hear about these problems, and absorb them, so it's a time-limited competitive advantage. But in the meantime, you're learning the next thing. The reason you're shipping rubbish is not because you aren't good enough to ship high quality; it's just that high-quality takes a lot longer. You need to have (or acquire) the ability to polish it - once you are sure you have something worth polishing. All that said, your product does need to do something useful; solve some problem (ideally that no one else solves; or no one else does it with some particular quality or tradeoff, that is valuable). It's crucial. With it you win; without it you lose. The quality and polish of other stuff is secondary.