If you are a Product Manager, chances are high that one of the key document that you are maintaining is the product road-map. However, presenting road-maps externally could be a double-edged sword and there are certain rules/guidelines that are helpful to keep in mind when using/presenting this document.
1) Do not let your roadmap serve as a means to alert your competition!
One of the common sources of competitive information is the presentations made by product / engineering teams to the external world. This includes your customers, and you need to be particularly careful if you are not the only vendor for your service, which is quite commonly the case. Often, the sales team may ask you to present your roadmap to help close that deal that your organization is so close to winning. Or, you may have to present a roadmap to keep high levels of customer engagement going. So while you cannot avoid these situations altogether, and you may not be able to always get your audience to sign an NDA to listen to your sales pitch, the only option that you have is to consider what you want to reveal.
Suggested rule of the thumb is to restrict disclosure to those features on which you already have a first-mover lead so you know that competition cannot beat you in terms of speed of hitting the market. It is a safe to assume that if any feature really excites the customer, they will check out if the same in the market. And if you are not sure when you are going to deliver it, chances are high that your customer could get it from your competition.
2) Do not let your roadmap close your mind to a customer request!
Do you feel that you could have achieved a closer relationship with your customer, but for the fact that you have to refuse features because as per the engineering team the requests are “not-aligned-with-the-product-framework”? If you believe that this is indeed the case, then your organization is not getting the true worth from the roadmap exercise. Customer’s are increasingly showing reduced tolerance for technology constraints, and are willing to go to competition for requests that cannot be serviced by their existing partners. Competition is typically too happy to play along in terms of servicing requests, which your team believes ‘unreasonable’ allows them entry into your business. I have seen cases where business was lost due to disagreements on roadmap alignment, even though the effort involved was relatively insignificant.
Suggestion: Try to use roadmaps to demonstrate what you can do, as opposed to defining limits of what can’t be done. In many cases, this may be more of a mindset issue, than a genuine blocker.
3) Can you deliver on your roadmaps?
This one would be familiar to many, and typically hits you a few months after you had made that last perfect presentation. Customers tend to forget that (a) roadmaps can change due to changing business priorities, and (b) the farther out you go, the lower is the chance of getting the feature.
Suggestion – In general, if you see a high level of interest demonstrated by a customer on a feature that exists on your roadmap, but you have no immediate intention of building, then it is better to inform that the same is still in the planning stage and you would be happy to engage more with them in terms of understanding the requirements in detail, before slotting this in a release. In case this is a prospect, then of course, you can consider adding this as a carrot for them to close the deal!
4) Know your competitor’s roadmap!
Before you present your road-map externally, try and see if you can get some information on what the competition has. While this is not easy to get, chances are that they may be slipping on many of the hygiene practices. You should check out with your sales team, and quarterly business review meeting are a good time to do this.
5) Continuous follow-up
Last but not the least – please keep in mind that your customers will remember your roadmap. Not the entire presentation, but that one feature that they so liked. It is important to note what they liked and keep them engaged on that point. The one thing that you really do want to avoid is that when you (or the next person from your organization who meets them) forgets to talk about this altogther. Don’t let it happen to you.
