The VP of Sales wants to know when the enterprise SSO feature will ship. The CEO needs a timeline for the mobile app. Your engineering lead just told you the authentication refactor will take twice as long as planned. Your beautiful quarter-by-quarter roadmap is fiction, and everyone is about to find out.
Now/Next/Later is the antidote to the false precision of traditional roadmaps. Instead of mapping features to specific dates — which are almost always wrong — it organises initiatives into three buckets based on commitment level: what you are doing now, what you are planning next, and what you are considering later. It is simple, honest, and remarkably effective at managing stakeholder expectations.
The Core Idea
The framework has three buckets. Now contains the initiatives your team is actively working on this quarter. These are firm commitments with clear scope and allocated resources. Next contains the initiatives you are planning for the following quarter. These are tentative — you are confident they matter but the scope and timing may shift. Later contains everything you are considering for the future. These are aspirational with no commitment attached.