Rosalie A. Huang

Everyone uses AI now. To code. To write. To ship faster. But planning still feels stuck in the old days. Roadmaps get built on guesswork. Marketing means posting and hoping.

I am following spec driven development. I write the specs first. Every feature, every decision, ties back to it. It keeps me from drifting into random ideas mid build. My roadmap comes from that spec, not from gut feeling.

I use the same thinking for marketing. I write down what I'm building, who it's for, and why it matters. Before I post anything.

So I'm curious. How are you planning your roadmap right now? Do you have an actual system, or are you winging it like most of us?

I recently came across a post on X saying that "if you're strong at execution but struggling to level up as a leader, you may not be simulating before communicating".

This caught my attention as I do simulate a lot of important conversations before they happen. I've recently used LLMs and interview coaching tools, and even vibe-coded my own tool to act as an AI coach. But my main issue is that every time I use any of these, I have to start over and rebuild the context of what matters and what not, and run into the same frictions again. That in addition to constantly tuning the often sloppy AI advice.

I m curious how other makers approach this.

The more features a product has, the harder it becomes to explain it without overwhelming a new user.

Do you:

guide users step by step
give them a simple starting task
let them explore everything themselves
use videos/tutorials
hide most features until they need them
or something completely different?