Hi there -
Here is this week’s “1 principle, 2 strategies, and 3 actionable tactics” for running lean…
1 Universal Principle
“Say no to product roadmaps.”
Founders love product roadmaps. They feel productive. They look impressive in investor decks. And they give you a false sense of control over the next 18-24 months.
But product roadmaps assume you know exactly what to build — which you don’t.
Worse, they put you back in the old world of waterfall planning, where any future deviation from the plan is seen as a sign of weakness rather than a sign of learning.
How do you reconcile making actionable plans under conditions of extreme uncertainty?
Replace your product roadmap with a traction roadmap.
2 Underlying Strategies at Play
I. Measure outcomes, not outputs.
A product roadmap is output-oriented. It tracks what you’ll build: features, releases, milestones tied to shipping code.
A traction roadmap is outcome-oriented. It tracks what matters: customers. Specifically, the rate at which your business model creates happy, paying customers.
The goal of a startup isn’t to ship features on time — it’s to build a repeatable and scalable business model. A traction roadmap charts key traction milestones on that journey, from your first 10 customers to product/market fit.
This distinction changes everything. With a product roadmap, you can be “on track” while building something nobody wants. With a traction roadmap, the numbers never lie.
II. Work backward from your Minimum Success Criteria.
Every traction roadmap starts with a single question: What’s the smallest outcome that would deem this project a success 3 years from now?
This is your Minimum Success Criteria (MSC) — not your moonshot, but your floor.
Once you have your MSC, you extrapolate backward using 10X milestones:
- Year 3: Your MSC (e.g., $1M ARR = ~830 customers at $100/mo)
- Year 2: 1/10th of that (~83 customers)
- Year 1: 1/10th again (~8 customers)
- 90-day goal: Your very next milestone
Contrary to common belief, 10X’ing isn’t just for hyper-growth startups. All startups can 10X two or more times in the first three years, provided you start counting from customer #1.
Don’t believe me? Work the numbers out for yourself.
3 Actionable Tactics
I. Define your one traction metric.
Every business model has a single traction metric — the customer action that drives revenue.
- Starbucks: Buying a cup of coffee
- Airbnb: Booking a room
- Your SaaS: Subscribing to a paid plan
This is your value capture step. More of this action = more traction. Define it before you build anything.
II. Deconstruct traction into the Customer Factory.
Your traction metric doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It results from a series of upstream steps:
Acquisition → Activation → Revenue → Retention → Referral
Measuring these five steps weekly creates a simple yet powerful dashboard that identifies your biggest bottleneck. Instead of optimizing everything simultaneously, dedicate 80% of your effort to breaking your single biggest constraint.
When that constraint improves enough that it’s no longer the slowest step, move to the next one. This is the GO-LEAN framework: Goal → Orient → Leverage → Experiment → Analysis → Next.
III. Use a Now-Next-Later rollout plan instead of a feature timeline.
A traction roadmap naturally breaks into three time horizons:
- NOW (90 days): Your most concrete plan — specific experiments, target customers, exact constraint to break
- NEXT (6 months): Less defined — strategic direction, scaling approach
- LATER (18 months): Fuzziest — big picture vision, market expansion
Tesla used this exact approach. Elon Musk’s “secret master plan” wasn’t a product roadmap — it was a traction roadmap: sell hundreds of sports cars (NOW), use that to sell thousands of sedans (NEXT), then tens of thousands of affordable cars (LATER). Each stage funded and de-risked the next.
Your time-frames depend on where you are. Pre-traction? Use yearly milestones. Already have customers? Use 90-day cycles with progressive doubling.
That’s all for today. See you next week.
Ash Author of Running Lean and creator of Lean Canvas
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P.S.
Building a traction roadmap used to take an afternoon with a spreadsheet. I’ve built this entire process into LEANSpark — our AI co-founder that creates your 10X traction roadmap from your Lean Canvas in under 2 minutes.
But the real power is what happens after: you can ask it questions like “Is my 90-day goal realistic?”, explore pricing scenarios and watch milestones recalculate in real-time, or have it identify your current constraint and recommend experiments to break it.
It’s like having a co-founder who’s read Scaling Lean cover to cover and can do the math on the fly. Try it here.