AMA: Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management, Julian Dunn on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

March 18, 2025 @ 10:00AM PT

How do you manage a roadmap when company leadership cannot or will not provide guidance? (e.g. the C-team is all newly hired and don't know enough about the product or customers)

Julian Dunn

Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management • 1y

This is a tough situation, similar to one in which a C-team won't clearly articulate a company's strategy or its short-term objectives. A mistake I've seen some PMs make is to wait for a strategy to be delivered from on high, when it's clear from surrounding circumstances that this is a fool's errand. I prefer to look at this as an opportunity: you are the product leader that knows both the product and its customers, so you should take control of developing a strategy and a roadmap to match it. ...Read More

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It seems like a PM role is stretched in multiple directions - business goals, engineering, customer satisfaction etc. How do you determine what's more important to focus on?

Julian Dunn

Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management • 1y

I try to focus a product team on the most pressing areas that only PM can do. Our job is to create unique leverage for the company, not try to do everyone's job. So for example, while it might be tempting to play junior engineering manager, it's not a good use of time for PMs to project-manage every single engineering story and deliverable (IMO). If I or my team have to flex into a role temporarily to fix a problem, I will make it clear to all stakeholders that it is a temporary fix. An example ...Read More

1,487 Views

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How do you determine how much of your roadmap should be focused on existing customers vs prospects?

Julian Dunn

Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management • 1y

To answer this properly, it's critical to know what your product or product line's goals are. What is the lifecycle phase of the product? Is it in its initial growth ramp, maintenance and retention, or God forbid, being replaced? For example, my current company (a startup) has an overall goal of acquiring new logos across all of its business lines. Thus, the majority of the roadmap is going to be laser-focused on that objective; new product and feature introduction, features to reduce on-boardin ...Read More

529 Views

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How do you balance the level of complexity / granularity of a roadmap? What is just enough fix and flex?

Julian Dunn

Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management • 1y

My preference is to focus a roadmap on "big digs" or themes of investment. Customers (and your sales team) generally want to see a roadmap not because they care about each individual line item, but to understand your general direction and whether that aligns to their own strategy. The roadmap is a tool for you to tell your story, and the more wiggle room you can buy yourself (i.e. staying away from very granular investments), the easier it is to tell that story. Roadmaps are as much marketing in ...Read More

950 Views

2 requests
Move Items on Roadmap: What are your suggestions for product leads when they need to efficiently explain that an item on the roadmap needs to move because some other item has become more important?

We are required to write long docs and spend hours on creating decks for leadership which is not the best use of time

Julian Dunn

Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management • 1y

Yeah -- that seems unnecessary for most day-to-day roadmap changes. In my view, lengthy discussion like this should only happen if one or more of the following is true: The items being substituted are significant enough that they will impact revenue, retention, customer satisfaction, etc. for a meaningful proportion of the customer base You have a belief that the decision is a one-way door (can't easily be reversed) Even for such big decisions, I would write the briefest papers possible to expla ...Read More

442 Views

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How do you balance "must do" work (compliance, maintenance, etc.) with objective/goal oriented work?

Julian Dunn

Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management • 1y

The best way that I've found to manage this is to fund these out of separate envelopes. Typically I will work with engineering to agree on the base % allocation of resources for the first set of items. Let's say it's 20%. That leaves about 70-75% of capacity for feature work (you need to leave 5-10% on a team for slack/unplanned work like incidents). Great, now you know how many FTE-equivalents you have in a given period to do features. As engineering estimates (they are estimating, right?!) eff ...Read More

509 Views

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Does it make sense to use quarterly format for roadmaps? Do you do capacity planning for roadmap items that are more than 6 months out?

Julian Dunn

Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management • 1y

I very much prefer not to use quarterly formats for roadmaps; I am a huge fan of the now/next/later roadmap. If pressed, I will say "now" is 0-6 months, "next" is 6-12 months, and "later" is 12+ months. Use whatever durations make sense for your company and stage. Quarterly labels start to make roadmap items seem like commitments. They are not, but it is an unavoidable consequence that people see a date and believe that is a fixed delivery date. I find it generally senseless to do capacity plann ...Read More

473 Views

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If you were the first creative hire in a company with a legacy/outdated product that's never been touched by a designer, how long would you reasonably expect before being able to set in motion the implementation of a new design system and new UX?

Julian Dunn

Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management • 1y

This depends a lot on whether it is materially causing problems for the business. (There are an awful of legacy products out there with legacy UX, but there few motivations to improve them because cost of market entry is high, for example, and so there are few new competitors) For the purposes of answering this question, I'm going to assume you are the first creative hire because there is a problem, and they want you to fix it. What I would probably not do is to go into meetings and pitch a new ...Read More

791 Views

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AMA: Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management, Julian Dunn on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

View AMA Answers

How do you manage a roadmap when company leadership cannot or will not provide guidance? (e.g. the C-team is all newly hired and don't know enough about the product or customers)

It seems like a PM role is stretched in multiple directions - business goals, engineering, customer satisfaction etc. How do you determine what's more important to focus on?

How do you determine how much of your roadmap should be focused on existing customers vs prospects?

How do you balance the level of complexity / granularity of a roadmap? What is just enough fix and flex?

Move Items on Roadmap: What are your suggestions for product leads when they need to efficiently explain that an item on the roadmap needs to move because some other item has become more important?

How do you balance "must do" work (compliance, maintenance, etc.) with objective/goal oriented work?

Does it make sense to use quarterly format for roadmaps? Do you do capacity planning for roadmap items that are more than 6 months out?

If you were the first creative hire in a company with a legacy/outdated product that's never been touched by a designer, how long would you reasonably expect before being able to set in motion the implementation of a new design system and new UX?