Stop Shipping Roadmaps, Start Shipping Behaviours
What if your roadmap had ZERO features—just the customer behaviors you promise to create?
Most teams obsess over shipping output. But retention and revenue come from behavior change: the loops you intentionally nudge, not the widgets you launch. Not features, but habits.
In enterprise retail and loyalty, the biggest unlocks I’ve shipped — including >$10M in incremental revenue across programs — came from designing for a few critical behaviors: first digital order fast, weekly repeat visit, profile completion + wallet on file. Once we reframed the roadmap around those, prioritization got simple. We built AI-powered personalization, timely triggers, and incentives as scaffolding to move the behavior, not as ends in themselves.
My behavior-led roadmap OS:
- Pick 3 behaviors that predict LTV (e.g., second purchase by day 14, list creation weekly, payment on file).
- Instrument leading indicators and set explicit thresholds.
- Map every feature to a behavior hypothesis and a kill metric.
- Use AI to adapt timing, surface, and message per user; run relentless experiments.
- Review weekly: if the behavior graph doesn’t move, the feature didn’t ship — even if code did.
Takeaway: features are tactics; behaviors are the product. Build the flywheel that customers repeat, and the P&L follows.
If your next quarter had to be behavior-only, which three behaviors would you commit to ship?