Product Management
Different roadmaps for different folks
2 Sep 2024
Your customers need fewer details than your co-workers. Your product organization requires a different level of detail than your sales and marketing teams. The people working on other parts of your product need more detail than those working on other products. And the members of your product team need specific details that no one else does.
This is a common failure mode of roadmaps. You spend a lot of time crafting the perfect roadmap slide and then share it with everyone. Product management won’t let sales share the roadmap directly with customers because it needs to be explained by a product manager to make sense. Meanwhile, engineers lose sight of the big picture because the roadmap doesn’t serve their needs—they end up focusing solely on the issue queue.
Think of a world map—it doesn’t show every town, and the towns that are shown don’t have every road detailed. A town’s road map won’t show hiking trails or elevations. Different people need different maps for different purposes.
Unfortunately, a whole category of tools has emerged that bake these failings right into a company’s processes. They take your Jira board and turn it into a presentable roadmap. Even if they allow you to create different versions of the roadmap, they don’t make it easy to include entirely different content for different audiences.
You need to tell your customers what problems you’re planning to solve. You need to tell your company why you’re solving those problems. Marketing needs an idea of when you’ll solve those problems. And your product teams need to discuss how you’re solving those problems.
These are all different roadmaps of the same thing.