AMA: Carta Sr. Director of Product Management, Anton Kravchenko on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

Ideas for new features come from various sources, including customer feedback, market research, internal brainstorming sessions, competitor analysis, and emerging technologies. To decide which ideas to invest in, product teams evaluate them against business goals, user impact, and technical feasibility. Personally, I find a lot of joy during the ideation phase. The biggest challenge I see teams face is bringing these ideas together into a cohesive narrative that generates virality before the pro ...Read More

Let me begin by emphasizing the problem. It's important to prioritize sales yet balance growth with sustainable practices that prioritize customer satisfaction and ongoing innovation within your product teams. How to gain autonomy in shaping your roadmap heavily depends on your organization's culture. Understanding whether sales, product, or engineering primarily influences the company's direction is key. In a product-driven culture, for instance, your product leadership (CPO) can often support ...Read More

I usually focus on deeply understanding the "why" behind an ask or input. One time, I heard "We should build a new product A" directly from a CEO. Asking the question "why" helped me understand that the broader delivery organization was undergoing a transformation, and building a new product would support the business while creating customer delight. In return, when conveying a point of view, I often refer to data or customer anecdotes. Offering customer-centric insights helps executives underst ...Read More

Your key stakeholders to shape a roadmap are: Customers/Users: Capture direct feedback and use data to gain insights into user needs, pain points, and feature requests. Sales & Marketing: This group will provide insights on market demand, competitive landscape, and feedback from prospects and customers. Support & Customer Success: These teams are an excellent source for understanding common issues, pain points, and feature requests from existing customers. Executive team: Seek guidance f ...Read More

At Carta, our end-to-end process for prioritizing features is rooted in strategic alignment, user-centricity, collaboration, and data-driven decision-making. For simplicity, you can think of the process in the following way: Align: Our process begins by aligning the team's product strategy with the overarching business objectives, ensuring that every feature we prioritize contributes directly to the company's strategic goals. During this process, we gather valuable insights from various sources, ...Read More

Navigating a product pivot involves recalibrating communication with stakeholders, including customers, investors, and internal teams. The primary goal is to build trust. I recommend transparently communicating the rationale behind the pivot and framing it as an opportunity for innovation and growth. At this phase, shifting your team's focus from long-term planning to short-term goals is crucial. Your ability to demonstrate tangible progress toward these short-term goals will deepen trust and re ...Read More

At Carta, our product teams collaborate closely with product marketing when building the roadmap to offer context into upcoming features and product enhancements. Product marketing leverages this information to develop compelling messaging, positioning, and go-to-market strategies aligned with the product roadmap. Once we get close to an upcoming release, we usually work together more often to shape the value proposition and share it with customers and prospects via webinars, blogs, and updates ...Read More