It’s roadmap season again! 

Everyone’s busy preparing their plans for next year. But a roadmap is more than just a list of features, it should be tied directly to your strategy. 

We all know that, and still struggle.

That’s because the starting point is often unclear. It’s messy. Chaotic. And that chaos isn’t a flaw; it’s built in.

By definition, strategy lives in uncertainty. It’s a high-level plan to achieve goals under conditions of uncertainty. Without uncertainty, you wouldn’t need a strategy in the first place.

When it’s time to build a roadmap, the real work isn’t jumping to solutions. It’s turning that built-in chaos into something coherent. And the best way to do that is simple: explain how you see the world. The frame you choose shapes everything that follows.

Easier said than done? Read further to learn how to do it in practice.

Framing the world with MECE

The simplest way to bring structure into chaos is to break the world into clean, non-overlapping pieces. That’s exactly what the MECE principle stands for: Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive. It was first coined by McKinsey and has become a powerful tool for structuring problems and strategies.

Mutually exclusive means the pieces don’t overlap. Each element belongs to one and only one bucket. Collectively exhaustive means that together, these buckets cover the entire problem space. Nothing is left hanging outside.

When you use MECE to frame your world, you create a clear structure that makes complex strategies easier to understand. It gives you a way to explain how you see the landscape before you dive into the details — and it helps everyone else see it the same way.

It also creates a practical foundation for bridging strategy and execution. Once the world is divided into distinct pieces, each piece can be addressed separately. It becomes easier to assign clear ownership, let teams work in parallel, and ultimately bring scale into the strategic process. Instead of one big, overwhelming problem, you have several focused challenges that can actually be solved.

The rest of this post will explain specific MECE narratives that I use with my clients to help  them bring clarity to their own chaos.

Narrative 1: Framing the world from the outside in

The simplest and most intuitive way to frame your strategy is to start by looking outward at the world itself. Imagine you’re standing by the company’s metaphorical window, showing a new team member what’s out there. What would you point to?

You might say, “These are our small customers, these are our medium ones, and these are our large ones.”
Or, “This is Europe, this is North America, and this is Asia-Pacific.”
Or maybe, “These are different customer profiles, and here’s how they differ.”

If you operate in a marketplace, that frame is often built in: buyers on one side, sellers on the other.

This type of narrative focuses on how the external world is structured, not on your internal plans or product lines. It helps everyone align around a shared mental model of the landscape you operate in. Once you have that shared picture, it becomes much easier to build a coherent strategy that reflects reality rather than internal org charts or wishful thinking.

It is often the broadest context that one can give, and therefore, I like using it as the first narrative with my clients. It’s easy to align on what everyone seems to already know, although it is rarely as simple. Stating what should be obvious often surfaces the misalignment, which is where the alignment process needs to begin. 

Narrative 2: Framing the world from the customer’s point of view

Another powerful way to frame your strategy is to look at the world through your customer’s eyes. This usually means breaking it down by the phases of the customer journey.

Note that I didn’t say ‘user journey,’ and deliberately so.

A customer journey starts long before they log in for the first time. It begins when they first hear about you, when they are deciding whether to trust you, and when they weigh whether your product is the right fit for their problem. Even if you, as a product person, don’t own the stages before the product is used, it is still your responsibility to make sure all the dots are connected.

If you want to make a real impact and turn chaos into clarity, you have to work with chaos wherever it lies. And chaos doesn’t stop where your responsibility does. You have to be willing to engage with parts of the journey that are not strictly product. That includes how prospects discover you, how they make purchasing decisions, and what happens after they become customers.

This narrative can also be framed around customer problems, although that is usually more tactical and better suited once the higher-level framing is already clear. Either way, the goal is the same: to create a structured view of the customer’s reality, so your strategy aligns with how they actually experience your product and company.

Narrative 3: Framing the world through the challenges you must overcome

A third way to create a clear strategic frame is by focusing on the challenges the company needs to overcome in order to reach its goals. This narrative looks at the road ahead, not through the lens of customers or markets, but through the critical wins that must happen along the way.

For example, if your goal is to reach product market fit for a new product, your list of challenges might include winning with a few key customers, building a consistent and repeatable sales motion, finding the right pricing model, and maintaining great retention rates. These are not activities on a roadmap. They are the milestones that define success.

This kind of framing shifts the conversation from “what we plan to do” to “what we must achieve.” It clarifies what truly matters, highlights the gaps between where you are and where you want to be, and focuses energy on the real strategic battles.

It is especially useful when you are dealing with high uncertainty, when the path is not fully defined yet, and you have many possible action plans. This lens highlights what you must win, which leads to strategic focus and clarity.

Remember, there is no single right way to frame your strategy. Each of these narratives offers a different lens, and the best one depends on your goals, your audience, and the kind of story you want to tell.

Since the framework is hierarchical, you can also use different narratives at different levels. You might frame the big picture through the external world, zoom into the customer journey at the mid-level, and define key challenges in each phase. The power comes from choosing the right frame for the right layer.