The Model-of-the-Week Roadmap: When Vendor Promises Become Committed Dependencies
A product manager pulls up the next-quarter roadmap. Three features are marked "depends on next-gen model." Nobody asks what happens if next-gen slips, arrives 20% smaller than the demo suggested, or ships gated behind an enterprise tier your customers do not qualify for. Six months later, all three of those scenarios have happened, and the team is now rebuilding two quarters of architecture against the model that actually shipped — a different shape from the one they planned for.
This is the model-of-the-week roadmap: treating unreleased capability claims as committed dependencies. It is one of the most reliable ways to turn a twelve-month plan into a thirty-month plan, and it rarely looks risky in the moment because every vendor demo feels inevitable. The schedule damage is invisible until the slip compounds.
