someone shipped my public roadmap two weeks after i posted it - do i stop posting specifics

Post outcomes, not plans. That one change keeps most of the benefit and removes most of the exposure.

What the audience actually rewards is the story of something happening - a number moved, a thing broke and got fixed, a customer said something surprising. None of that requires telling anyone what is in your next sprint. Roadmaps are the least interesting thing you post and the only thing worth copying.

I moved to shipping first, posting after, and engagement went up. Turns out people find a finished thing with a result attached more compelling than a promise, which in hindsight is obvious.

The uncomfortable answer is that they were probably already building it. Everyone in a category with a shared set of users converges on the same obvious next features because the same customers ask everyone for them. The roadmap you posted was likely on their board before you wrote it.

That does not mean posting is free. It means the specific harm here is smaller than it feels, and the feeling is mostly about being small next to someone bigger.

What genuinely does get taken is positioning and copy. I have had my landing page headline show up nearly word for word on a competitor's site. Features get reinvented independently. Sentences get stolen.

Disagreeing with the reassurance in this thread. In a small niche with three players, publishing your plan is materially helpful to your competitors and the polite framing that they were doing it anyway is not always true.

I stopped posting anything forward-looking after a similar experience and my growth did not suffer at all, because the audience for build-in-public posts and the audience for the product overlap much less than people assume. Most of my readers were other founders. Almost none of them were buyers.

Worth measuring before you decide what you are protecting. If your public posting has never produced a customer, the calculus about what to reveal changes a lot.

Middle path I settled on: public numbers, public lessons, private roadmap. Customers get the roadmap in a monthly email if they ask for it, which also turns it into a reason to talk to customers. Nobody has ever complained that the public version is vaguer.

A well funded competitor copying a feature usually ships a worse version of it, because they are building it for a segment average and you are building it for the twenty people you talked to last month. Speed and specificity are the two things you have. Neither survives being cautious.