Sharing feature roadmap to public or keeping it stealth?
Carlos Leyva Salas
5 replies
Some companies think it's best practice to showcase the feature roadmap so their customers can get a better idea of where the product is going, whilst some other companies prefer to keep the roadmap stealth so they can make changes as they go or as new strategy directions become evident.
What camp are you on? what's the best practice for you?
Replies
Vinish Garg@vingar
It depends on the maturity of the product roadmap in context of the product vision, and it also depends on the message that you communicate to the customers while sharing the roadmap.
For example, if you say—"This is what we plan...", do you mean that:
- you are open to their feedback and thoughts? Are you trying to get them involved in prioritizing something that might not be freezed yet and you are open to suggestions?
- Or, it is locked for engineering and you are merely sharing it for their reference?
In the later case, do you have a product voice that can handle if they request changes or question something that might impact how you have prioritized?
Share
I'm all for building in public and getting users involved in the journey so I would suggest sharing your roadmap with others.
The reasons:
1. People appreciate transparency.
2. You get feedback before building anything
3. Helps you prioritize according to user needs
4. Find beta users to test the product
5. You can sense what users want and plan future features
IMHO, I think it depends on your customer, the type of product/service you are providing and the maturity of the product. Some questions/points that could be considered...
- Will your customers benefit from knowing where the product is headed?
- Will they engage, that is, do they care or are they just looking for the right solution/s and experience. For example as a customer, when I am using products like Airbnb, Classpass, am I actually thinking about what these products have coming up in their roadmap, likely not?
- Will sharing your roadmap too soon put you in a competitive disadvantage?
- Will sharing your roadmap restrict your direction? Maybe not, depending on how far you share out.
- Will you aim to use the share to elicit feedback and build better product, as others have stated this is a massive + for building publicly.
Building product has so many shades of grey that sometime its not possible to side with one camp only, my favourite response as a PM is "it depends" :)
Sharing your roadmap to public becomes an easy thing if you apply a powerful project management tool, such as GanttPRO https://ganttpro.com/.
This Gantt chart maker allows for sharing the roadmaps using the Public URL feature.