What To Do When Roadmap Hijacking Becomes Business As Usual

Let’s talk about how to turn roadmap hijacking into your strategic advantage.

What Is Roadmap Hijacking

Simply put, roadmap hijacking is when an influential stakeholder shows up one day and proposes to alter the course of an entire project or program or product. 

It’s not a technical term, per se. But it does feel exactly the way you’d feel if you were driving your team to Bournemouth and a stranger suddenly hopped in and told you to head to Sausalito. 

It’s not new, either: ask anyone who has a boss, and you’ll get an earful of not-so-petty grievances on the matter. 

But what is new is the fuel source: what we’re seeing today is mostly the result of the unprecedented onslaught of hype, fear-mongering, and pseudo-science spewing from the global disruption caused by AI.  

Examples Of Roadmap Hijacking

These days, you don’t need to look very far to find instances of roadmap hijacking. For project teams it often comes in the form of tool selection, preferred methodologies, or goals. For product teams, it’s an amplified version of frenetic backlog re-prioritization, sudden changes to the release schedule, and requests to change the ICP completely. 

Here’s one from real life: a member of my community was asked to build a set of agents in Asana. They did a bang up job. Then at their next skip-level, they were told to rebuild it in Claude. Not for any ethical or principle-driven reasons — just because people have been saying Claude is “better”. 

Or, as another example, I spoke with an agency team that was told to convert all waterfall projects to agile because leadership was under the impression that predictive methods wouldn’t be able to handle work happening at the speed of AI. (They might not be wrong, but there’s a better way to go about it!)

The product teams arguably have it much worse. One SaaS product marketer told me in confidence that they were asked to re-position their product towards an executive audience because the decimation of entry-level jobs was also driving tool budgets down for their distinctly middle-management customer base. 

Similarly, a startup founder hinted at the fact that they were under immense pressure from investors to ship AI features that hadn’t been validated, tested, or even asked for by their customers. They needed to protect funding, so resisting AI features wasn’t a good look. 

What Causes Roadmap Hijacking

The interesting thing about roadmap hijacking is that it usually comes from a good place. Okay, okay, “good place” might be a bit of a stretch — let’s just say it comes from a place of being invested in the outcome.

Sure, it also blends in a healthy dose of mistrust, power games, ego, and control freakishness. But if your project or product wasn’t important, they wouldn’t be as compelled to interfere. 

At the heart of it is a differential between fear and trust. 

How it normally starts is with exposure to consequential facts or opinions from a trusted source. Maybe it’s a conversation with a fellow business owner over lunch, or a post from a thought leader on LinkedIn. It gets the gears turning, and it starts the research. 

The research helps form a POV — maybe through web searches, or by chatting with an LLM, or talking to other trusted peers and SMEs, or a combination of all of that. Most influential stakeholders don’t like to come to the table uninformed. They want to know if their fear is founded and if they’re smart enough to see what others don’t and take action before others do. 

But that’s where the trust comes in. If there truly was trust in the team, they would have consulted with you in their research phase. If they’re coming to you with a directive, you’re not in that circle of trust. 

Ultimately the trust gap amplifies the fear. Fear that the outcome isn’t right anymore. Fear that the work will no longer achieve the outcome. Fear that the team is just mindlessly doing what the plan says. Fear that no one is thinking about the bigger picture. Fear that they put all their chips on HD DVD instead of Blu-ray.

I guess what I’m saying is that these stakeholders aren’t always just throwing their weight around to create a mess. They are worried that everyone else is working in the boiler room, not seeing the iceberg approaching. 

Stakeholders aren’t always just throwing their weight around to create a mess. They are worried that everyone else is working in the boiler room, not seeing the iceberg approaching.

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How To React To Roadmap Hijacking

Roadmap hijacking almost always puts people on the defensive. That’s understandable given that the teams have been working their tails off in the trenches, and this is exactly the kind of unsolicited deus ex machina that makes them feel like their work — and their intelligence — is invalid. 

As a leader, it’s even more complex than that. In addition, you’ll feel that pressure to step up and push back immediately as an advocate for your team. You are the opposition leader, the voice of reason, the counterweight to unilateral authoritarian decision-making. You will feel the need to go to war for your team. But that’s rarely the most productive approach. 

Here’s how I’d recommend approaching it…

Align Understanding

Most stakeholders will swoop in because they don’t trust that anyone has considered what they’re bringing to the table and — even if they have, they don’t believe they understand the implications from their perspective. You can use this opportunity to focus on the goals rather than the tactics — sometimes it turns out that everyone is actually aligned in principle, even if they don’t all agree on the details. 

That does two things: firstly, it proves to the stakeholder that you are able to see things from their perspective, reinforcing trust. Secondly, it creates a bridge for your team to understand the stakeholder’s perspective as well. 

Most stakeholders will swoop in because they don’t trust that anyone has considered what they’re bringing to the table.

Challenge Strategically

Instead of being the classic middle manager pushing back and justifying the plan from the perspective of the team, put yourself on their level. Arm them with the details they need to convince themselves (and their own party-crashing stakeholders) that either the current trajectory is fine or that a snap pivot can be made with just a touch more analysis and planning. Act as a partner with them in this, not an obstacle adding more friction to the process.

Act as a partner, not an obstacle adding unnecessary friction to the process.

Manage Team Emotions

At the same time, you will need to help regulate your team’s emotional response to this. Change is hard, and it’s hard not to take external suggestions personally. Most folks won’t react visibly in the room with a senior stakeholder, so check in with them afterwards either 1:1 if you can. Use those conversations to explore how the changes impact them so that they can get bought into the idea, even if they disagree with it. Getting your team on side and keeping their morale high isn’t babysitting, it’s leadership. 

Getting your team on side and keeping their morale high isn’t babysitting, it’s leadership.

Make Change Unremarkable

But above all, strive to normalize change in your project team culture. It’s easy for us humans to get attached to a plan, and it’s easy to try to slough off accountability when someone else takes the wheel, and it’s to feel victimized by surprises beyond our control. But a truly antifragile team will have the ability to react productively to changes, assess the impact swiftly, and continue on with an even better plan than before. Make change expected, not an unforeseeable natural disaster.

Make change expected, not an unforeseeable natural disaster.

How You Can Turn Roadmap Hijacking Into Your Strategic Advantage

Now what if I told you that the way you handle roadmap hijacking could be your strategic advantage? 

The way I see it, this is a classic middle-leadership proposition. You’ve got an opportunity to manage up and manage down — or, as I like to put it, you have an opportunity to facilitate meaningful collaboration across different levels of the organization. 

Here’s how...

Proactive Risk Identification

As AI continues to weave its way deeper into our projects, your current and future value as a leader is going to revolve around risk. The question stops being “can we do it” and starts becoming “should we do it”. Speed isn’t a benefit if you hit every pothole. 

So one of your best approaches as a leader will be to come at it with a posture of “we could do this, but let’s do a bit of analysis on the risks and opportunity costs. Here are the top risks I see.” That makes your response immediately valuable, sidesteps unnecessary confrontation rituals, presents you as the voice of logic and reason, and positions you as a thought partner instead of having you play Carol from the “computer says no” skits.

And I don’t mean slow, bureaucratic risk analysis here. Your delivery process should have the tools and culture to identify and plan responses to risk as rapidly and naturally as getting out of bed in the morning. In fact, your AI tools should be working in the background to surface market trends, identify stakeholder risks, and model different options before you have your second cup of coffee.

Rapid Replanning

The same is true for your ability to lead the replanning process without losing momentum. Your value now becomes more about quickly evaluating options with your teams, assessing impacts, and tailoring the smartest approach to drive the target outcomes within the broader ecosystem you’re playing in. 

Once again, your sound judgment and leadership at speed are what create value here. You have the context, the political understanding, the non-verbal communication skills, and a level of judgment and taste that is unique to you. 

That doesn’t mean getting better at creating perfect, highly-detailed plans in the project management tool du jour. It means leveraging your tools and AI team mates to provide viable project plans that take into account your organization’s processes, structure, and constraints. It means becoming an expert at reviewing these plans and driving decisive dialogue with your teams to make good decisions. It means casting a vision and rallying your collaborators around new ways to achieve the same bigger-picture goals. 

Flexible Resourcing

Once you have the plan, your next value pillar is orchestrating the talent to pull it all off — because a perfectly risk-managed, highly adaptable plan doesn’t mean a thing if you haven’t got the right pieces on the chessboard. 

This again is an opportunity to position yourself as an enabling partner instead of a defensive linebacker. Perhaps the phrasing is less about “we can’t do this unless we can bring on more people” and more along the lines of “here’s what we could do with the people we have available… and what the opportunity cost will be”. 

But rather than having your team work 100-hour weeks to move mountains, it might mean focusing on the most impactful and enabling increment of value. All that Minimum Viable Product talk since the early 2000s? It’s a hundred times more relevant today for this exact reason. Be a strategic partner by leading your team to the shortest possible path to clarity and value. 

And, again, your tooling should be supporting this: resource forecasting based on team skills and interests, not just titles and seniority; capacity modeling that factors in multiple scenarios; a bench of fractional talent with a streamlined process for onboarding them rapidly. Resourcing shouldn’t be the masterpiece, it should be the equivalent of getting the right colour onto your brush.

A Better Way To Engage Stakeholders

Here’s where I get controversial: I actually think this should be the norm. But instead of misinformed stakeholders reacting with panic, us middle-leaders should be helping arm them with the right information to make better decisions. 

And as we’re doing that, we should be mentally preparing our teams to live in a mindset of change and disruption. We need to build resilient processes that can respond to rapid shifts. We need to be emotionally ready to lean on our craft and our instincts when we need to pivot. We need to embrace the fact that our ability to anticipate and handle volatility is the best use of our skills.

The result is what we all want: speed in delivery that automates the admin, maintains alignment, and amplifies our strategic value as humans. 

So… maybe roadmap hijacking isn’t the new “swoop-and-poop” after all. Maybe it’s actually been win-win all along. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!