Physics vs. Fiction: Why Your Roadmap Will Fail Before it Starts

The Fallacy of "100% Capacity"

Most roadmaps are built on a lie. They assume:

• 40 hours of work per engineer per week
• Zero attrition
• Seamless context switching

In reality, after meetings, PTO, sick days, and context switching, the effective coding time of an engineer is often 15–20 hours per week.

If your roadmap assumes 40, you are mathematically guaranteed to fail before you write a single line of code.

Scenario Planning: The "Digital Twin" of Your Organization

To fix this, you need to move from deterministic planning (Gantt charts) to probabilistic forecasting (Monte Carlo simulations).

You need a digital twin of your engineering organization that allows you to run “what if” scenarios:

• Scenario A: If we pull the senior backend team to fix the billing outage, how many days does the Q4 mobile launch slip?
• Scenario B: We are hiring 5 new engineers. Given a 3-month ramp-up time (based on historical data), when will they actually impact velocity?

The NotchUp Difference

NotchUp doesn’t just read the roadmap; it reads the history.

It knows that Team A usually underestimates tickets by 30%. It knows that Feature B requires a skill set (for example, Rust) that you only have 2 engineers for.

It applies this operational physics to your roadmap to give you a confidence interval:

“There is only a 20% chance of hitting this deadline with the current resource allocation.”

That is the difference between a roadmap and a prediction.

Simulate your roadmap reality. Try NotchUp’s Scenario Planner.