What is the difference between vision, strategy and roadmap?

The three layers

Vision describes the world once you have succeeded. It is directional, durable and deliberately not measurable. Anyone should be able to design tools for merchants of every size, or every person has a private financial life that is not sold. Vision answers why this company exists and survives changes of leadership.

Strategy is the chosen path. Which customers, which problem, which advantage, and — the load-bearing part — which attractive things you will not do. Strategy is where the actual decisions live.

Roadmap is the sequenced consequence. It should be derivable from the strategy: someone who understood the strategy should find most of the roadmap unsurprising.

The missing middle

The common failure is having layers one and three and nothing between them. The vision is inspiring, the roadmap is full, and no principle connects them — so every stakeholder request is equally admissible, because nothing in writing excludes anything.

The diagnostic is simple. Take your strategy statement and ask which currently-requested feature it rules out. If the answer is none, you have a description of your ambitions rather than a strategy.

WhatsApp is the sharpest illustration of the opposite. No ads, no games, no gimmicks was a strategy because it forbade specific, immediately lucrative things. It settled hundreds of roadmap arguments without any of them being escalated, and it cost real money to hold.

Strategy is subtraction

Shopify's orientation toward merchants rather than consumers is a strategy in the strict sense: it makes an entire category of consumer-facing opportunity ineligible, however attractive individual examples look. Microsoft's cloud-first turnaround was a strategy because it demoted the business that had defined the company for two decades.

Both are choices with a cost. That is how you recognise one.

What each layer is for, practically

Layer	Answers	Changes	Fails when
Vision	Why we exist	Rarely	It is a slogan nobody can act on
Strategy	How we will win, and what we decline	Occasionally	It forbids nothing
Roadmap	What we are doing and roughly when	Continuously	It is a list of stakeholder requests

The test for a roadmap

For each item, ask which part of the strategy it serves. Items that answer nothing are either strategy drift or an unwritten strategy the roadmap has been following instead of the stated one — and the second case is worth investigating, because the unwritten one may be the better strategy.