A Gentle Q2 Check-in on Your Abandoned Q1 Roadmap
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from a user named Alli (@sonofalli). The tweet adopts a concerned, personal tone, formatted like a popular meme, to deliver a sharp professional observation. The text reads: 'babe are you ok? it's q2 and you've barely touched your “q1 roadmap”'. The humor lies in the juxtaposition of the intimate, caring phrase 'babe are you ok?' with the harsh reality of corporate project management. It perfectly captures the all-too-common scenario in tech companies where ambitious quarterly plans (the 'q1 roadmap') are quickly derailed by unforeseen issues, shifting priorities, or unrealistic estimates, leaving teams behind schedule as the next quarter begins. The tweet is deeply relatable to anyone involved in software development, product management, or any field governed by quarterly planning cycles
Comments
8Comment deleted
Don't worry, the Q1 roadmap isn't abandoned. We've simply rebranded it as our 'Q2 Stretch Goals' and moved the original Q2 roadmap to the 'Future Innovations' slide in the appendix
Pro tip: just rename every untouched Q1 epic to “Q2 discovery” and watch the KPI dashboard magically stay green
The only thing more fictional than our Q1 roadmap is the belief that we'll catch up in Q2 - but don't worry, we've already scheduled the Q3 planning session where we'll confidently rescope everything we didn't deliver as 'strategic deprioritization'
This hits different when you're in Q3 explaining to the board why your Q1 OKRs are now 'stretch goals' for Q4. The real engineering challenge isn't building the features - it's the mental gymnastics required to reframe 'we haven't started' as 'we're being strategic about sequencing.' At this point, the Q1 roadmap isn't a plan, it's historical fiction we're all collectively pretending was always meant to be aspirational
Roadmaps are Gantt fan fiction until someone assigns capacity; by Q2 ours was renamed “carryover,” and the only deliverable was the status deck
Quarterly planning is WaterScrumFall’s git rebase - every QBR rewrites history so the ‘Q1 roadmap’ now points at Q2
Q1 roadmaps: meticulously groomed in Jira during holiday sprints, silently demoted to 'future epic' by Q2's inevitable pivot
q1 yeah I know that, nice game Comment deleted