Actions Not Words Reveal Our True Values

Actions, not words, reveal our true values. It's the same for roadmaps and strategy for software products.

I know lots of brainpower and time is spent building and maintaining roadmaps, but in my experience what ends up on them often rarely reflects where the majority of investment of the time and talent of software (especially SaaS) product teams will actually go.

How often are you looking back at what actually happened to make sense of where the effort went? What does that history say about what your strategy and your roadmap actually are going forward?

Can you effectively contend with recent reality as part of making future strategy and plans?

I've spent so much of my own time or the occasional intern's time doing retrospective analyses in recent years that I've ended up building my own software to make doing the analysis work and communicating about it easier.

Who else has success stories of how reflecting on what actually happened made for better planning going forward?