Planning a Roadmap for an Undocumented Product Without Business Stakeholder Support

You are a product manager at Paramount Global and need to build a roadmap for a product that has no documentation describing its current state, and you cannot count on the business team for help. How would you create the roadmap? Explain how you would get the understanding you are missing, decide what goes on it, and get people to support it. ```hint Find the sources that still exist Ask which sources of truth remain when nobody hands you context, and how much you can trust each one, before you commit to a plan. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is the product already live with users and an engineering team, or is it at an early stage with little built? - Why can't the business team help: has it been reorganized, is it fully committed elsewhere, or does it disagree with the product's direction? - Who is the roadmap for and how far ahead should it look: an engineering plan for the next quarter, or a yearly plan for leadership? - Is there a company-level strategy or an executive sponsor I can anchor priorities to? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A structured plan for rebuilding the missing context from sources that still exist, with a view of what each source can and cannot tell you. - A product goal and success metrics drawn from that discovery, stated as hypotheses where evidence is thin. - A prioritization approach that weighs impact, confidence and effort and treats the uncertainty from missing business input explicitly. - A roadmap format suited to uncertainty, plus the documentation the candidate creates along the way. - How the candidate earns buy-in, manages the risk of hidden commitments, and keeps the business team informed or brings it back in. ### Follow-up Questions - Two months in, the business team becomes available and disagrees with your top priority. What do you do? - What would you do in your first week, and why that first? - How would you decide which roadmap items are safe to commit dates to?