Roadmap before Goals

Many companies believe that teams should set goals first, then define the roadmap to meet those goals:

As a company, we know what we want to accomplish and we'll empower our teams to figure out how to do it.

This rarely works in practice. In the absence of any roadmap, teams are lost. This "goals first" approach incentivizes teams to do whatever it takes to achieve short-term goals, often at the expense of a focused features, UX etc.

Instead, goals should flow from a product roadmap that has been designed to deliver value to users. Instead of "seeing what sticks" to customer-centric.