AMA: Matterport VP of Product, Preethy Vaidyanathan on Product Roadmap Planning

What is your objective, who is your audience and what are their needs. An effective presentation of your roadmap addresses all three questions. The communication style you deploy is starting with the audience's needs and weaving in what you hope to achieve. For example: Your audience: prospective customer, Your goal: inspire to close the deal * Understand prospective customer main pain points. Highlight the main product features existing and in your roadmap that addresses the pain points and solves them effectively * To address your goal, weave in visuals, other customer testimonials, case studies to drive inspiration and show what success would look like if they adopted your product offering Your audience: Sales, marketing, field teams, Your goal: drive adoption of upcoming features * Present roadmap themes, features that solve customer/market problem and how they help drive customer goals * To drive your goal to pitch the new launch and drive adoption, connect the launch to what your GTM will care about. Is it part of top asks from existing customers, does it help unlock new customer segment or vertical and how this can help your cross-functional team in-turn be successful to hit their quarterly goals

If you are unable to have a longer term roadmap view: then proactively reset expectations while increasing the cadence of communication. There may be a number of reasons why you are in this state: product pivot, external event like global pandemic happening that changes customer and market dynamics beyond your control. Switch your roadmap in these scenarios to focus on assumptions you are looking to quickly prove/disprove before more additional investments. Then provide an accelerated pace of communication that shows how you are making progress towards validating in the market and what decisions you are taking with the feedback. For example, if you are used to communicating your longer-term roadmap quarterly, move to a monthly read-out instead. 

When deciding between dedicated vs. 3rd party engineering, consider the following factors: Final product experience: Evaluate the final product experience delivery to customers. For example, with a 3rd party tech team, does your design decisions make it a longer workflow for customers because of limitations of your tech stack? Is that an acceptable trade-off? Time to market: There is still some cost to your internal engineering teams (onboarding, training, code reviews etc) when using a 3rd party tech team. Consider if this is a short-term vs. long-term strategy. Sometimes for business reasons, an important project acceleration is required. A long-term strategy is more beneficial if this is not just for a project, but rather an investment for continued roadmap acceleration. Cost-benefit analysis: Consider roadmap feature time to delivery and accelerated business outcomes between the two options vs. cost implications (incremental 3rd party spend). Benefit vs. cost analysis will be helpful to determine whether to use only your dedicated engineering team or pick a hybrid of internal and 3rd party tech team for faster time to market.

This can happen because your product growth potential is sufficiently broad across multiple customer segments or you may be operating a complex product surface that serves different segments (eg: multi-sided marketplace). Turn this impossible situation around, instead of asking your execs to pick one segment (which seems limiting), focus on prioritization. * Align with your exec on the primary customer segment or priority order of customer segments. This will unblock roadmap prioritization for your teams. * Reiterate how choices, trade-offs, and investments re-affirm the aligned customer segment priority with your execs when presenting the roadmap. * Periodically review customer segment priority with market data to ensure your product strategy evolves as your business grows.

There are three high-level options: * Internal roadmap only * Fully public: roadmap published externally for all customers and prospects * Customer-facing roadmap that your Sales, Customer success, Sales Engineering and field teams are trained on to share The choice of roadmap depends on your product category, type of customers you serve, and organization structure. For instance, developer-facing products typically prefer public roadmaps, while B2B has a stronger preference than B2C for external roadmaps. If you have customers doing long-term commitments 2-3+ years, they would typically want to see the product strategy and roadmap over that period of time. If you choose to create an external roadmap, focus on: * Content creation and * Commitment to keeping your roadmap up to date Curation can be done with high-level descriptions such as customer problem solved and feature summary vs. specifics on the implementation, quarter or halves of the year vs. specific dates. You can also provide personalized talk-track and messaging for your field teams to highlight different aspects of your roadmap based on the audience. Lastly, create rigor within your organization to keep the roadmap updated periodically.