Your changelog is not a roadmap

Adding a feature every sprint feels like progress. It is not.

Rob Fitzpatrick puts it plainly in The Mom Test: users will tell you what they think you want to hear. They will ask for features they will never use. The only honest signal is behavior, not feedback.

In B2B, it gets worse. The person who asked for the feature is rarely the person who uses the product. You built for the wrong voice.

Jason Fried and DHH just declared "pencils down" on Basecamp 5, two years in development, and the final call was to stop adding and start finishing. No new features. Only tightening what is already there. In their words, adding something new at this stage only creates loose ends.

That is the hardest product decision to make. Because a shorter changelog feels like standing still.

Watching what users actually do, and making that experience undeniable, that is the roadmap.

Your changelog is not a roadmap. It is just a list of things you shipped.