AMA: Confluent Senior Director of Product, AI Products and Strategy, Sean Falconer on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

It’s a big question, and there’s no single answer but in my career the common thread is immersion. Early in my career at Google, I went through ~600 support tickets and grouped them by theme. That gave me a clear picture of where users were struggling. The biggest issue wasn’t advanced functionality, it was just getting started. That insight led to building a console to simplify onboarding. That was the seed of the idea. At my startup, we started with a much looser hypothesis. We wanted to do so ...Read More

A lot of these situations come down to transparency and inclusion. In my experience, when sales leadership tries to dictate the roadmap (or anyone for that matter), it’s often because they don’t understand how decisions are being made or they don’t feel heard. When that happens, people fill in the gaps themselves, and that usually leads to tension. It’s much better to bring them into the process early, make the criteria visible, and show how input is actually being considered. You don’t have to ...Read More

I think this mostly comes down to being prepared. Good execs are usually looking for input, it’s not their way or the highway, but they’re also not going to just take your word for it. If you have a point of view, you need to back it up with real evidence and show that you understand the tradeoffs. If you’re going to challenge, expect to be challenged back. That’s a healthy dynamic. The goal isn’t to win an argument, it’s to get to the right decision. So come in with a clear recommendation like ...Read More

If leadership isn’t providing guidance, you have to step in and fill that gap. That’s the job. There’s never really a moment where a PM can throw their hands up and say, “no one told me what to do.” You either already have enough signal, or you need to go get it. Then put together a clear, evidence-backed plan and bring it to leadership. Don’t ask “what should we do?”, instead ask “here’s what we think we should do, here’s why, do you agree?” Especially with a new C-team, they often want that. T ...Read More

I wouldn’t start by trying to sell product management. I’d start with a roadshow. Sit down with engineering leaders and do two things: Explain how you think about product, so what you do, how you work, where you add value More importantly, understand their world and where are they feeling pain today? Are priorities constantly shifting? Are they getting unclear requirements? Are they building things that don’t get used? Are they stuck translating between stakeholders? If product management can’t ...Read More

This is very true and part of the fun and complexity of the role. You have to wear a lot of hats. As a former founder, I love this. I also think of balancing these different directions similarly to how I approached it with my own company. You have to put your time and attention behind the areas that are the biggest fires, biggest gaps, or biggest opportunities and ignore everything else. It's hard, because there's always a million things to do, but if you try to do everything, you end up doing n ...Read More

The importance of product vision doesn’t go away as a product matures, but how you apply it changes and so do the kinds of people and problems you need to solve. In the early days (0–1), it’s all about innovation. You don’t really know what will work yet, so the vision is more directional than precise. You’re deeply immersed with customers, forming hypotheses, and running experiments to find product–market fit. This phase tends to favor “innovation people”, those who are comfortable with ambigui ...Read More

I try to make prioritization feel less like intuition and more like a consistent set of lenses we apply to every decision. One thing that’s been important in practice is how we collect input. We gather and stack rank feedback continuously throughout the quarter, not just at planning time. If you wait until the start of a planning cycle, people tend to overweight whatever happened most recently. Ongoing collection gives you a much more accurate picture of what actually matters over time. From the ...Read More

With how fast things are moving, especially with AI, the idea of a detailed 18–24 month roadmap is starting to die. You just can’t predict that far out with real confidence anymore. Just in the past 4 months, the entire DX has changed. No one could have predicted that and sticking to some roadmap you drew up last year just because you put time into it would be a huge mistake. What you need is: Clear vision about where you’re going Concrete near-term plan so everyone understands what you’re doing ...Read More

In a lot of organizations, PMM isn’t treated as a strategic partner. They end up as glorified order takers making slides and packaging launches. That’s a mistake. If that’s the extent of their impact, the function was set up wrong. I’m a big believer in involving PMM early, not just at launch. When we’re thinking about the roadmap, I like to ask: what will the launch actually look like? What’s the press release? What’s the demo? What story are we telling? PMM is a great partner in shaping that, ...Read More

When priorities shift, it should feel like a response to reality, not a shift based on a whim or your isolated opinion. Keep the conversation tight and grounded in evidence: What changed? New customer signal, deal pressure, competitive move, production issue, or industry shift. Why does it matter now? Tie it to impact like revenue, risk, adoption, or strategic positioning. What happens if we don’t move? This is often the most convincing part. Make the cost of inaction clear. What’s the tradeoff? ...Read More

Start with the why, not the template. In organizations new to product, roadmaps often get mistaken for delivery schedules or feature lists. Reframe them as a way to communicate priorities, bets, and direction, anchored in outcomes. Before introducing any format, align teams on what they’re trying to achieve and how success is measured otherwise you’ll get consistency in structure but not in thinking. Then take a product approach to rolling it out. Ask: what’s the MVP roadmap for this organizatio ...Read More

When you’re talking to potential users, the key is steering the conversation away from their ideal vision and toward what would actually change their behavior. Start by grounding everything in what they do today. Have them walk through a real example and where it breaks down. Then shift to questions like, “What’s the minimum this would need to do for you to use it?” or “If this existed tomorrow in a rough form, would you try it?” That framing naturally surfaces MVP needs. You can push further wi ...Read More

In product work, the biggest real value from AI today isn’t that it’s magically building production systems for you. It’s that it’s dramatically accelerating how you think, explore, and make decisions. AI has made software more ephemeral. As a PM, I can spin up a working demo instead of writing a one-pager and hoping people can visualize it. Teams can prototype multiple approaches in parallel and stress-test tradeoffs in real code before committing. The barrier to building has dropped so low tha ...Read More