AMA: Gainsight Director, Product Management, Pavan Kumar on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

Start with a good understanding each one of your audience. For executive leadership, emphasise high-level goals and how key initiatives align with the company’s strategic objectives. For sales and marketing, focus on the features, differentiators, and timelines that help set customer expectations. Customer support and success teams benefit from knowing specific capabilities, potential customer impact, and key training dates. Tailor detail levels based on each group’s role. High-level themes are ...Read More

Typically, several key stakeholders generally contribute to the roadmap, each bringing unique insights based on their functions, goals, and customer interactions. Broadly they include: Executive Leadership (e.g., C-suite or senior management): They provide strategic direction and ensure alignment with high-level business goals. Sales and Marketing Teams: They bring insights from the market, customer demands, and competition, helping to identify trends and refine positioning. Customer Success and ...Read More

For a product pivot with unpredictable directions, aligning stakeholders' expectations around flexibility and frequent updates is key. Here’s how to approach this: Adopt a Rolling Roadmap: Shift from a long-term fixed roadmap to a shorter, rolling roadmap that focuses on the immediate few months. Emphasise that the roadmap will be revisited and adjusted as insights from the pivot emerge. Introduce Themes Over Features: Communicate high-level themes or objectives rather than specific features or ...Read More

Making a roadmap publicly available can build transparency and trust with customers, stakeholders, and partners. However, it's essential to carefully decide when and what to share. Here’s when it makes sense and how to differentiate a public roadmap from an internal one: When to Make a Roadmap Public Customer-Centric Industries: If you're in an industry where customer feedback is essential for product success, sharing a roadmap can demonstrate commitment to user needs and align expectations. Com ...Read More

At our company we are transitioning from a quarterly planning cycle to an 'agile' approach. With the advent of ChatGPT and accelerated product development cycles across the industry it has become challenging to meaningfully progress features when they need to be planned months in advance. Here is a short brief on why we choose to make this shift. Shortfalls of Quarterly Planning: Lacks flexibility and responsiveness to change. Locks teams into rigid commitments, making it difficult to pivot as c ...Read More

A straightforward formal approach is better when recommending changes to the roadmap. Its important to cover both the urgency and the impact on previous priorities. To convey changes you may focus on following : Provide Context: “We’ve identified a critical priority that requires immediate attention due to recent developments. Here’s why it necessitates a reordering.” Link to Strategic Goals: “This shift aligns with our strategic objectives, supporting our growth targets and enhancing value deli ...Read More

Using a quarterly roadmap format helps keep everyone aligned and focused on near-term goals, especially when sharing progress with stakeholders. It provides structure, helps with predictability, and is great for setting priorities over the next few months. However, for roadmap items more than six months out, detailed capacity planning can be tricky, as priorities or requirements often shift. For these longer-term items, it's usually better to keep estimates high-level and flexible, adjusting det ...Read More

To introduce roadmapping in a team new to product practices can be tricky especially when the team has not yet experienced the importance of iterative planning and value delivery. You can confidently take the following approach to align your team with the roadmap planning collaboratively while you transition the organisation to adopt a product first mindset. Start with some training and explain why roadmapping is valuable, emphasising how it aligns teams and keeps everyone focused on common goal ...Read More

Depending on the complexity of the product being built, and the investment needed initially to get to the MVP phase, I have used several different methods - each having its merits: 1. MoSCoW Method (Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, Won't-have): Break down features into categories: Must-have for MVP, Should-have for secondary versions, Could-have for nice-to-haves, and Won’t-have for now Helps stakeholders see which features are truly essential for the MVP and manage expectations about what co ...Read More