Lily-Pad Reverse Roadmapping
Work backward from a distant ambition and stage the audience journey
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 99%
Lily-Pad Reverse Roadmapping begins with a two- or three-year ambition and works backward through 18-, 12-, and six-month horizons to identify the product, engineering, design, and marketing foundations required now. Each release acts as a lily pad that moves both the software and the audience toward the future destination. Separate teams handle everyday funnel performance and longer-horizon construction so urgent work does not continually displace strategic progress. Higher-altitude teams leapfrog one another across six-month release cycles, with resources peeling off and joining as required. The tracks remain coordinated: teams avoid optimizing a component that will soon be redesigned, while marketers understand how each product change should advance customer expectations and language.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain, where Hiroki Asai described Airbnb's multi-year plans, six-month release horizons, and leapfrogging teams.
Core principles
- 01Near-term releases should build foundations for a distant ambition
- 02Product progress and audience understanding must advance together
- 03Long-term builders need protection from everyday optimization work
- 04Teams can leapfrog one another across successive release cycles
How to run it
- 1
Name the distant ambition
Describe the product and customer reality the organization wants to create in two or three years. Make the destination concrete enough to expose required capabilities.
Pro tip State how the customer experience and market perception will differ.
Watch out A vague aspiration cannot guide foundational investment.
- 2
Walk backward
Step back through 18 months, 12 months, and six months. At each horizon, identify what must already exist for the next stage to be feasible.
Pro tip Include engineering, design, operations, supply, and marketing prerequisites.
Watch out Do not create milestones that merely divide time without building dependencies.
- 3
Design the lily pads
Define successive releases that give customers useful value while moving them toward the longer-term offering. Specify what the audience should understand after each one.
Pro tip Make every lily pad independently valuable as well as strategically directional.
Watch out A bridge release that offers no present value may fail before the destination arrives.
- 4
Split operational altitudes
Assign capacity for everyday funnel tuning separately from long-horizon foundational work. Establish explicit priorities where the two tracks intersect.
Pro tip Protect named people or teams from routine interruptions during strategic build periods.
Watch out If the same people own both tracks without safeguards, short-term work usually wins.
- 5
Leapfrog the teams
Stagger teams so one ships the nearer release while another advances the following horizon. Reallocate people deliberately as work moves between discovery, construction, and launch.
Pro tip Plan handoffs around capability and knowledge, not only headcount availability.
Watch out Uncoordinated leapfrogging can duplicate work or create incompatible foundations.
- 6
Reconcile every optimization
Before tuning existing surfaces, check upcoming redesigns and strategic dependencies. Decide whether to optimize, accelerate replacement, or defer the work.
Pro tip Compare the expected short-term gain with the work's remaining useful life.
Watch out Do not spend heavily optimizing something scheduled for replacement in six months.
In the wild
Airbnb plans visible work six and twelve months out while grounding it in a two- and three-year direction. Teams leapfrog across release cycles, and separate groups continue daily funnel tuning.
→ Near-term releases build toward a larger product vision without abandoning current performance.
Common mistakes
Letting the urgent consume the strategic
Everyday performance work expands until no one builds the future product. Assign protected capacity and separate operating altitudes.
Optimizing a soon-to-be-replaced surface
Local improvements can waste time when a redesign is imminent. Evaluate the remaining useful life of every optimization.
Moving the product without the audience
Customers may not understand a sudden future offering if marketing has not prepared them. Stage the narrative alongside the software.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for organizations evolving a product and its market narrative across multiple major release cycles.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when the strategic destination is too uncertain to justify foundational commitments beyond the next learning cycle.
From the transcript
“you need to think about where you want to be in two years, step it back to 18 months, step it back to 12 months,…”
“how do we take our audiences on a journey, lily pad to lily pad to lily pad to take them on that journey, you know,…”
“we're working at different altitudes simultaneously, and then at the higher altitude work, we're leapfrogging to get to a much further vision.”
From the episode
The $86B Marketing Playbook Behind Airbnb w/ Global CMO Hiroki Asai
Hiroki Asai