Why Now / Next / Later Beats the Gantt Chart
A roadmap format guide for PMs at big, timeline-loving companies.
If you work at a large enterprise — a bank, an insurer, a telco — odds are good that the first roadmap you inherited looked like a Gantt chart. Columns for each quarter, bars running across them, every feature pinned to a delivery date six months away. It looks organized. It looks responsible. It looks like something you'd show a steering committee.
It's also, according to the people who invented modern product roadmapping, the wrong tool for the job.
Janna Bastow, who co-founded ProdPad and Mind the Product, is about as close to the source of the modern roadmap as you can get. On Lenny's Podcast she said, pretty bluntly: "I used to do timeline roadmapping. The first version of ProdPad was actually a timeline roadmap." She'd take the features she was working on, line them up against due dates, and get "a little pat on the head" from her boss. Then she'd miss the dates. Then she'd blame herself for being bad at delivery.
The insight, eventually, was that she wasn't bad at delivery. The format was lying to her.
The problem with timeline roadmaps
Bastow's core critique:
As soon as you have a timeline, it turns it into a math chart sort of thing, where you've got time on the X axis and things to do on the Y axis and you basically end up with everything underneath assigned a due date or an iteration. And it seems that everything that you do has a due date just by the format of the roadmap, which is painful. It's just wrong, because we don't have that. The further out you plan, the more you're making it up.
Read that last line twice. The further out you plan, the more you're making it up.
Gantt charts imply certainty that doesn't exist. Q3 features get the same visual weight as Q1 features, even though your confidence in Q3 should be much lower. Everyone downstream — engineering, marketing, legal, compliance — starts treating those Q3 bars as commitments. When reality shifts (and it always does), you're stuck renegotiating every bar instead of acknowledging what everyone already knew: you didn't really know what Q3 looked like yet.
The Now / Next / Later format
Bastow and her co-founder tossed the timeline and replaced it with three columns:
- Now — what the team is actively working on
- Next — what comes after this, with decent confidence
- Later — problems and bets we want to take on eventually, but haven't scoped
That's it. No dates on the axes. Dates get added to individual items only when they're actually knowable — typically the things in "Now" and occasionally the top of "Next."
This works because it encodes the cone of uncertainty directly into the format. "Taking from the idea that things get less certain as they get further away, which is kind of how reality works," as Bastow put it. Now is concrete. Next is directional. Later is intentional but loose.
Why this format is especially good for big companies
You'd think this "looser" format would be harder to sell in a process-heavy org. In my experience it's actually easier — once you reframe it.
Here's the reframe to try with your leadership: a Gantt chart is a commitment document. Now / Next / Later is a strategic priorities document. The first one is a promise you can't keep. The second one is a conversation you can have.
When an exec asks "when is feature X shipping?", the Gantt chart forces you to either lie or disappoint. Now / Next / Later lets you answer honestly: "It's in Next, which means we're committed to the problem and working through scoping. I'll have a firmer date when it moves into Now." That's not hand-waving — that's an adult conversation about planning.
Rolling quarters: the pragmatic middle ground
If "no timeline at all" feels too radical for your org, look at how Miro does it. In Lenny's How Miro Builds Product piece, the team describes a rolling six-month roadmap with explicit confidence levels: ~80% confidence on the current quarter, ~50% confidence on the next. Beyond that, it's directional.
That's Now / Next / Later with numbers attached. It gives the steering committee what it needs (a date-flavored artifact) without pretending you know things you don't know. I'd suggest this as your first step if Gantt is deeply embedded: keep the quarterly structure but label your confidence. It changes the conversation immediately.
Linear takes yet another approach — "a single centralized roadmap for the whole product" — with two strategic workstreams planned in detail for the next two quarters, a sketched half beyond that, and a backlog to pull from. Same DNA: near-term specific, far-term loose.
Making the switch at a big company
A few moves that work, especially in a regulated, process-heavy org like an insurer:
- Don't kill the Gantt in week one. Build the Now / Next / Later view alongside it. Let stakeholders compare. People trust what they can see.
- Anchor each "Now" item to a problem, not a feature. "Reduce quote abandonment" ages better than "Quote Flow V2." Problems survive scope changes; features don't.
- Attach metrics, not dates, to "Later." If the item in Later says "Improve NPS for claims," no one asks when it's shipping. They ask what the metric is doing.
- Refresh it on a rhythm the org already has. If your division runs PI planning every quarter, use that cycle. Don't invent a new cadence on top — you'll fight a two-front war.
- Tell people what the format means. You'll save yourself ten meetings if the document itself has a one-paragraph intro: "This is a Now / Next / Later roadmap. Dates appear only where we have real confidence. Items in Later may shift in or out based on what we learn."
The honest punchline
Bastow's closing idea, and the one I'd hold onto: the value isn't in the roadmap artifact. It's in the roadmaping process — the conversations, the sequencing, the ruthless re-ordering as you learn.
A Gantt chart freezes the conversation. Now / Next / Later keeps it alive.
For a new PM at a big company, that's the more important shift than the format itself. The point of your roadmap is not to be a legal document that binds you to a date in Q4. It's to be the live artifact your team, your stakeholders, and your execs use to make the next decision. Choose the format that makes that easier.
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