Product Managers: How to Build Consensus on Your Product Roadmap
Note: This post was adapted from a longer article on communicating your roadmap to stakeholders. Read the full version at www.productplan.com.
Effectively communicating the roadmap to stakeholders can be a real challenge for product managers.
On one hand it’s important to be agile and iterate in response to feedback. On the other hand, you can’t listen to everyone all the time or you’ll ship a clunky product with no overarching vision.
Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules for sharing product roadmaps. Your particular process will depend a lot on your company size and culture, as well as the type and stage of the product you’re building.
However, there are several things you can do to help build consensus on product strategy. The most important thing is to engage your stakeholders throughout the planning and development process, and make sure everyone understands what your priorities are.
We’ve identified 4 high-level steps that can serve as a launching point for developing your own roadmap communication process. We take a top-down approach in which you first define strategic goals for your product, and those goals inform the initiatives you include on the roadmap.
1. Work with your executives to define strategic goals.
The first step in building any successful product is defining specific, measurable goals. Work closely with your executives to develop a clear product vision and identify the metrics most important to your company. Some common examples include growing recurring revenue, reducing churn, going after larger accounts, etc.
Use a high-level roadmap to walk your executives through a handful of themes that you’ve identified as most important for your upcoming planning period.
2. Discuss top priorities and determine how they fit into your strategic goals.
After you’ve agreed on your strategic goals and identified a set of themes that will help you achieve them, you can start prioritizing specific initiatives within those themes.
This is where open communication with department heads in engineering, sales, marketing, and customer support becomes important. If you involve your stakeholders in the prioritization process, they are much more likely to be on your side. Ask what their top priorities are and determine together how those initiatives fit into the big picture.
3. Translate your product vision into actionable steps.
After you’ve prioritized the roadmap to reflect strategic goals and reached a consensus among key stakeholders as to what will be included, it’s time to start allocating resources and designating release dates.
Make sure each team within the engineering department knows what they are working on, and understands how their projects contribute to the bigger picture. You might find it easiest to create custom roadmaps for technical audiences that are more granular than those used at higher levels of the organization.
4. Make sure everyone is on the same page for your release.
Once plans have been determined and engineers have been set in motion, schedule meetings with sales, marketing, customer support, etc. to explain what’s coming next.
Use a high-level roadmap that communicates product direction, and be sure to exclude specific dates when presenting to customer-facing teams. As an organization gets very large, it becomes much more logistically challenging to include every single person from these departments, but you should involve the directors and managers so they can then pass the information on to their respective teams.
Read the full version of this post for more thoughts on the roadmap communication process, plus advice for running product strategy meetings and presenting your roadmap in front of a group.
