Zero-Cost Public Roadmap | Hollis Cooper

Screenshot of the Blackthorn public roadmap

The Problem

The product team was changing our customer feedback platform. The new solution did not include public roadmap functionality. The company had always maintained a public roadmap that was heavily used as a reference by sales, customer success, and support teams.

The previous solution had multiple problems:

It was not brand-compliant
It didn't iframe well on our site, so team members would often share the direct vendor URL instead of the official company URL
Updating it created friction because it required a significant context switch for product team members

The Requirements

Any replacement needed to meet all of the following:

Easily editable and publishable by anyone on the product team
Brand-compliant look and feel
Work well on mobile devices
Correctly iframe on a Salesforce Community site
Zero additional cost

The obvious options were to procure a new SaaS tool (cost + procurement time) or request an internal engineering build (time + capacity). Both had tradeoffs. I saw an opportunity to solve it myself.

What I Did

I took the initiative to build a solution myself using Claude Code, leveraging existing tools and processes to reduce friction for the product team.

Data source: Built the solution to run entirely off a Google Sheet accessible to the entire product team. No new tools, no context switching.
Brand alignment: Gave Claude Code our brand guidelines and it created a page template in alignment with our brand, while keeping the same mental model as the original public roadmap
Iframe solution: Had Claude Code generate a solution for iframing that could communicate with the outer window to correctly render the content on our Salesforce Community site
Automation: Google Sheets data is automatically pulled into brand-compliant HTML published via GitHub Pages

Total time from idea to deployed solution: less than one day.

The Result

The final solution was a success praised by leadership:

Scrolling and iframe issues were fixed, making it easier to share the "official" URL with customers
The product team didn't have to go outside of existing tools to work on the roadmap
The roadmap was now brand-compliant
Eliminated the cost of finding and procuring a new third-party solution

What I Learned

AI-assisted coding is a product tool, not just a dev tool. The value here wasn't writing code faster. It was eliminating the procurement process entirely. A PM who can vibe-code a solution in hours changes the decision calculus for the team: instead of "should we buy or build?", the question becomes "can we validate this ourselves before committing resources?"

The best solution isn't always the most technical one. A Google Sheet + static HTML + GitHub Pages is not a sophisticated stack. But it met every requirement, cost nothing, and the product team could maintain it without any engineering support. Simplicity was the feature.

Know when vibe-coding is the right tool. This worked because the scope was narrow, the requirements were clear, and the solution didn't need to scale beyond a single page. For a multi-page app with auth and database needs, the approach would be different. The judgment call is knowing which problems fit.