Roadmaps that look beyond six weeks tend to drift from reality. Customer requests change, infrastructure surprises happen, scope expands.
The pattern that works: a rolling six-week ‘now’ list, a high-confidence ‘next’ bucket, and a ‘later’ bucket for everything else. The commitments live in ‘now’; the rest are bets.
Shape Up’s six-week cycles formalise this. Even teams that do not adopt Shape Up benefit from the timeline.