AMA: Splunk Sr. Director, Head of AIOps and IT Ops Products, Kara Gillis on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

I tailor the product roadmap to the person / group with whom I'm communicating. I often will use Google Slides for a customer or sales facing presentation. With engineering, I'll often use a spreadsheet that lists roadmap initiatives in the order of priority and effort. Communicating with customers: Is this the first time we're speaking? How much time do we have? If it's the first time we're giving a roadmap presentation to the customer, I provide more context upfront to help the customer unders ...Read More

Executive alignment on your roadmap is pretty key to getting funding and resources to deliver on your roadmap. Your executive team probably cares about customer success, growth, and potentially things like margin/security/compliance. Tie your roadmap to these outcomes very clearly. If you can communicate very clearly HOW your roadmap item helps achieve more than one of these outcomes / benefits, you are more likely to get buy-in.  What happens when you disagree with the executive? Well, that dep ...Read More

In a perfect world, you want at least 80% of your roadmap to be applicable to both! But, we don't live in a perfect world, do we?  Some startups focus on a small number of customers and really customize the product to the desired features of those early users, but I like to first go broad in appeal, and then deep into a few features that are highly impactful to as many users as possible. If you want to reach a new type of user, solve a new use case, or enter a new market, you will have enough of ...Read More

Prioritization is more art than science. My goal is to actively listen to all stakeholders and help communicate how I make tradeoffs and how that impacts timeline to deliver a requested feature. But as a rule... Customers have the most impact on roadmap. Then engineering (especially on tech debt, architecture, compliance, and quality improvements needed). Then, I weigh any influence from market trends and changing competitive landscapes. Here, I consult with analyst relations, product marketing, ...Read More

I think you say exactly that! "We're pivoting our product. There are a lot of unknowns. It's hard to plan our roadmap too far out. We're resetting expectations on how much we can communicate..." THEN, I would add this... "We are focusing on these 3 themes in this priority - 1... 2... 3...Our goal is to deliver these X, Y, and Z customer outcomes by pivoting our product. We plan to have an update on these themes in ABC timeframe." It's ok not to have all the answers in times of big change and amb ...Read More

I am a huge fan of public roadmaps! But, I think this is depends on:  Organizational cultural preference  Mission of the company / product (are you building a product to help companies provide public roadmaps, for instance?) What industry you work in  If your product is open source or build products for developers Whether you serve B2C or B2B - or if your sales motion relies on product led growth While I my career has been almost exclusively B2B focused, I mostly see public roadmaps in B2B softw ...Read More

I think it depends on what you mean by "building the roadmap." If you meant "how does product marketing help communicate the roadmap to sales and customers?" - this is a huge benefit to close partnership between product management and product marketing. Product marketing should be involved early and often in the launch of a new product or feature, specifically by learning the problem the roadmap item is intending to solve, understanding the market context and competitor alternatives to your prod ...Read More