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 solv ...Read More

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 y ...Read More

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 c ...Read More

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 r ...Read More

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 pa ...Read More