AMA: Meta Senior Director of Product Management, Poorvi Shrivastav on Roadmap Planning

Love this question and have witnessed this scenario often. I'd say try to establish a common framework with your sales leadership so noise doesn't misguide signal when it comes to prioritizing customer feedback. Maybe a feature gets priority if there are X number of smaller customers asking for it or a larger customer (provided we can platformize the feature) is worth Y ROI. Whatever be the framework, you need a common understanding because these requests aren't one off so product and sales leadership needs alignment on why something is on the roadmap.

I think it depends on whether the product has a market fit or not. If it's pre market fit, then we'd want to lean towards prospects to ideally find a core group of sticky users. If it's post market fit, then you balance customers and prospects to both drive engagement and adoption.

It varies. Mostly the stakeholders fall in four categories 1. Customers especially in B2B larger enterprise products (there is sometimes more control here) 2. Partners like engineering, design, data science etc. who provide feedback and help crystalize the sequencing of work 3. Senior leadership who often wants a concrete, confident and rationale driven roadmap but sometimes might also have top down asks 4. [Optional] For core, platform or internal products - Internal stakeholders like other product leaders, finance or HR partners etc. For control vs influence - my rule is I will pick my battles based on balancing ROI for company above ROI for product. In the longer term, this rationale helps guide better investment decisions. Sometimes, you do have to firmly disagree but commit to moving forward and sometimes it's okay to hold your ground respectfully but with rationale (it helps if you have already earned the respect of your leadership through your body of work within and/ or outside the company when making unpopular decisions).

I think executives in all shape and form need guidance from domain experts. They are looking for product leaders to have confidence in their conviction and share the same confidence with executives. I usually form my opinions based on data and experience with the help of my team and then present to executives, reiterate multiple times with the help of visuals and then share broadly with teams after alignment. Sometimes, I'd use competitive (e.g. a market is already saturated in a particular segment) or complimentary examples (e.g. a company in an adjacent category focussed on a certain market and gained traction and similar parameters apply to us) to signal a GTM move that can benefit or not benefit us. Ultimately, you have to show the executives path forward with a plan A and a plan B (backup) when deciding on a market.

I think public roadmaps make sense once you are post product market fit but it's important to remember to only lookout 6 months or so (with safe harbor for future usage/ purchasing statements). Once you are post GTM fit, then it makes sense to go further out to 12 months and provide dates for 6 month launches. I typically suggest including major product changes that the team is fairly (> 90%) confident on delivering along with separate comms on other smaller changes that might be relevant for certain subset of customers.

I think there are a lot of frameworks when it comes to prioritization. At the end of the day, what is important for me is a combination of 1. prioritization 2. sequencing to arrive at a confident and well executed roadmap. Whatever be the framework, there are several signals to utilize 1. Feedback criticality from customers 2. Important of the product/ feature in the product maturity cycle 3. Competitive pressure or innovation 4. Upwards input/ company alignment 5. ROI (Cost benefit analysis)

This is the best scenario in my opinion. Reason being, as a product leader you can both help define the future of your product as well as develop confidence and guide your leadership, which will help your career prospects as well. Again, having the confidence in your conviction and guiding leadership with rationale is the key here. Lean into your cross-functional partners like data science and design to plan roadmap and then guide your C-suite towards that direction.