It’s a trap many organisations fall into. A new software platform promises innovation, efficiency, and transformation. The vendor’s roadmap looks polished, ambitious, and exciting. Features are mapped out, updates are scheduled, and the glossy slide deck paints a vision of the future.
Your software vendor’s roadmap serves their future, not yours, and it is not your strategy..
Too many leaders conflate the two. They mistake a vendor’s product plan for a blueprint of their organisation’s future. Businesses then end up aligning themselves to someone else’s priorities rather than their own.
Why This Happens
Software is no longer a back-office utility. It’s the nervous system of modern business. Vendors know this, and they build roadmaps to keep customers invested in their platforms.
But these roadmaps are designed with one objective: the vendor’s success.
- They prioritise what helps the vendor capture market share.
- They showcase features that strengthen the vendor’s positioning.
- They lock customers into ecosystems that deepen dependency.
That doesn’t make vendors bad actors. It makes them smart businesses. But it does mean leaders must draw a hard line between a vendor’s commercial roadmap and their organisation’s strategic direction.
The Risk of Mistaking Roadmaps for Strategy
When businesses confuse roadmaps with strategy, three risks emerge:
- Strategic Drift
Your organisation begins following vendor priorities rather than its own. Instead of shaping technology to serve your vision, you reshape your vision to fit someone else’s technology. - Innovation Blindness
A vendor roadmap highlights their next release, but what about emerging tools, disruptive startups, or cross-industry innovations they won’t show you? Anchoring strategy to one roadmap blinds you to wider opportunities. - Locked-In Dependency
Over-reliance on a single vendor means your agility is compromised. If the roadmap changes, or slips, your business is left exposed.
A genuinely business-driven roadmap avoids these pitfalls. As Rimini Street highlights, successful IT roadmaps are defined by autonomy, strategic alignment, and independence from vendor lock-in, ensuring IT leaders remain in control of direction rather than outsourcing it to a supplier.
How to Take Back Control
The solution isn’t to ignore vendor roadmaps, it’s to reframe how you use them. Roadmaps are inputs, not instructions. They inform decisions, but they do not dictate them.
Here’s how leaders can ensure their business strategy remains firmly in their own hands:
1. Anchor Strategy in Business Outcomes
Define what success looks like for your organisation, growth, resilience, efficiency, customer experience, independent of any vendor. Only then evaluate how vendor offerings align to those outcomes.
2. Use Roadmaps as Indicators, Not Instructions
A roadmap is valuable for trend-spotting. It tells you what the vendor thinks the market wants. Use it as one data point among many, not as the foundation of your strategy.
Tempo makes the distinction clear: strategy must come first. Your roadmap should serve as a tactical expression of strategic goals, not a substitute for them. Confusing the two leads to misalignment and stagnation.
3. Diversify Your Technology Ecosystem
Don’t build your business future on a single product. Create a flexible architecture that allows you to adapt, integrate, and pivot if a vendor changes course.
4. Challenge and Influence the Roadmap
The best vendors will listen. Use your purchasing power and influence to push for features that serve your strategic objectives, not just theirs.
5. Keep Ownership of the Vision
Your IT and business leaders must stay in the driver’s seat. Vendors are partners, not pilots. The role of leadership is to ensure technology aligns with strategy, not the other way around.
The Role of Leadership
This is a leadership issue, not just a technology one. Too often, executives delegate roadmap alignment to IT teams, assuming it equates to strategy. It doesn’t.
Leaders must ask:
- Are we shaping technology around our business goals?
- Or are we bending our business goals to fit a vendor’s technology?
Your strategy should dictate the tools you use, not be dictated by them.
Closing Thoughts
A vendor’s roadmap is designed to serve their future. Your business strategy is designed to secure yours. When leaders fail to distinguish between the two, they risk building someone else’s vision instead of their own.
The best organisations treat vendor roadmaps as useful insights, but never as marching orders. They use them to inform, not define.
Because at the end of the day, your competitive advantage doesn’t come from following a software vendor’s plan.
It comes from executing your own.