Product Roadmaps

Product Roadmaps are harmful because they kill surprise factor and excitement for your users and motivation for you. Keep them to yourself. Don’t share them with your users.

Let’s say you have a product with many passionate users. They keep asking for new features. You agree with their suggestions. You think these are great ideas and you should definitely implement them yesterday. But, should you tell your users about your roadmap? The answer is no. Never tell your users your product roadmap. Keep it to yourself. Here is why.

Excitement

When you tell them about your plans they will get excited about it. But, they cannot have it right now. So, the excitement will be short-lived.

You cannot use their excitement for feedback or promotion. Since they can’t try it they can’t give you feedback about it. You cannot ask them to tell their friends about the new feature because there is nothing to talk about, yet.

Expectations

Now that you have created expectations, they will keep asking when the new feature will be ready. You will feel like you owe them. You will get stressed about it. It will kill your motivation.

One of the common reasons for unhappiness is expectations. When you set them up with an expectation they will be not be happy with your product until the expectations are met.

Surprise

When you tell your users about a planned new addition beforehand they will not be surprised when you finally release it. You have already lost the surprise factor.

Products and ideas evolve as you develop them. What you come up with at the end might be very different than what you’ve planned at the beginning. You might come up with something so cool that people will have to tell each other about it.

Don’t pre-empt their surprise.

Flexibility

You might get excited about a new feature, and then decide that it is not a good idea. Or you find out the way you thought about it was completely wrong and you need to change the idea. Or you might decide that the new feature is not as high priority as you thought and there are more important things you need to work on.

Once your promise users about a new feature you lose the flexibility. You lost the ability to change your plans.

Motivation

Thinking about surprising your users is pretty motivational. Once your told them about your plans now you owe it to them to go through with it. Otherwise they will think you are unreliable. Doing something because you have to do is not as motivational as thinking how awesome it will be to impress your users.

Competition

Your competition might also see your roadmap and pre-empt you. Now instead of having this shinny new feature you finish second. Don’t give your competition heads up unnecessarily. Let them learn about your plans after you complete them.

What is the alternative?

You should definitely plan ahead. One great advise I heard is to write a press release about the new feature or product, but keep it yourself. It will make things concrete for you and your team. Does that press release excite you? If it excites you, that’s good, you are on the right track. The secret press release will also burn off your desire to tell someone about your plans.

You should definitely talk with your users. I am not against it. Ask them to describe their needs and desires. You can tell them you will definitely consider implementing such feature in the future, but you cannot promise anything about when/if it will implemented. You should simply not set any expectations.

Never tell users about your plans until you have a beta version they can try. Use their surprise, excitement to get feedback from them and to get their help promoting the new feature to other users and to the outside world.

Steve Jobs was master of using people’s surprise and excitement to promote new products. I remember the iPad release. I just had to tell everyone I know about it, and I even had to get them to watch the video. I didn’t get over it for days.