Executives push for feature/date roadmaps because a roadmap feels like a tool of control. Hickman calls this false control: a team can deliver 100% of a roadmap's features on schedule and still produce zero business impact if the underlying assumptions were wrong — "was that product team successful? No, the product team wasn't successful because the company failed."
Her coaching prescription: executives should stop trying to control which features get built, and instead control strategic context — business objectives, vision, strategy, and priorities (see Business Strategy, Product Vision) — then hold teams accountable to their own definition of success via Outcome-Based Roadmap Reframing. This is the same underlying shift described more generally in Product Model (vs. Roadmap Model) (vs. Roadmap Model): control moves from output-picking to context-setting.
The coaching response to an executive demanding feature- or date-level control is not to ask them to give up control, but to relocate it: redirect their control from picking specific features/dates to setting strategic context — vision, strategy, business priorities, and the definition of success (see Product Vision, Business Strategy) — while the team owns the solution and is held accountable for hitting it. Framed this way the trade isn't a loss for the executive: demanding tactical control actually pulls them into decisions builders are better positioned to make, which is the more precise version of the 'false control' claim — it reduces, rather than increases, their real leverage over outcomes.