We have developers but nobody owns the roadmap. Who should?
It depends on whether anyone has the authority to decide what gets built next, and the experience to make that call well. The roadmap should belong to one senior technical leader who sets direction, keeps the work visible and in priority order, and sees that it gets done. If your company cannot justify a full-time CTO, a fractional one can own it for a few hours a week.
Evidence
Developers are managed; a roadmap needs leading. In Management vs. Leadership I passed on Robert X. Cringely's distinction: management is telling people what to do, and leadership is figuring out what ought to be done and then getting people to do it. Management works on an assembly line. It works poorly for complex work like building large software. A team with developers and no roadmap owner usually has plenty of the first and none of the second.
The owner keeps the work visible and in order. In What is Kanban and why is it important? I described the Kanban board: work moves from To Do, through Doing, to Done, where the team and its stakeholders can all see it. That visibility lets you judge whether a deadline is realistic and reprioritize so the most important work is finished first. Unfinished work is like unsold inventory, so the order the work is taken in matters as much as the work itself.
The owner closes the loop. In Got problems? IPD: Identify. Plan. Do. I wrote that every problem needs only three steps, and that many people identify a problem, perhaps plan for it, and rarely get to doing it. Worrying, complaining and making excuses are not steps. A roadmap with no owner tends to stall the same way: the problems are known, the plans are discussed, and nothing ships.
I run my own software the same way. WASBuilder is a Kanban board where each card is a ticket and each column is a state in a fixed lifecycle. I write the ideas, answer the questions the agents ask, and approve every merge; the agents do the work in between. The board shows at a glance where every piece of work stands, and the plan page puts the larger pieces in the order they have to be done.
What it takes
One owner with real authority. The roadmap owner has to be able to say no, change priorities and make the call when the developers disagree. A committee, or a roadmap shared between the founder and whichever developer is loudest, does not work.
The business goals, said plainly. The owner turns them into a short list of work in priority order, so somebody on the business side has to be available to say what matters most.
A visible list of the work. A board, a tracker, or anything everyone can see, kept current, with the work in progress kept small.
The honest limits: a roadmap owner does not replace the developers, and a few hours a week will not suit a company that needs someone in the office every day. If what you have is a team that has stopped shipping, start by finding out why before deciding who owns what next.
Next step
Tell me about your team and what is stuck. As your Fractional CTO I take ownership of the technical roadmap on a part-time retainer, so your developers have someone to escalate to and your leadership gets straight answers.