AMA: Zendesk Senior Director of Product Management, Farheen Noorie on Roadmap Planning

How you communicate your roadmaps depends on who you are communicating it to plus the existing processes in your organization. Here are some examples Executive Staff: I have had success in creating decks for E-staff members highlighting the specific items that they are interested in. I have presented these decks in a meeting setting to gather feedback and also setup clear expectations on the Anti Roadmap (What we are not going to do) Stakeholder Teams outside of your group: My favorite is a read ...Read More

Prioritizing only for Sales teams can lead to traps where you are building Product one customer at a time and these products may not speak to each other. On the other hand by not including Sales you will be missing out on a core team that speaks to your customers every day. My recommendation would be to Take Sales and other stakeholders along the journey Conduct joint prioritization sessions with Sales, Customer Success, Strategy, Design and Engineering. Get them up to speed on the strategies yo ...Read More

My strategy would be to either Give them enough context and try again for guidance Change the question So how do you do either of those? Instead of asking for guidance on the roadmap, you can try one or more of the following Is the roadmap too detailed for your C-team? Instead can you get feedback on strategy vs roadmap? Setup sessions with the C Staff where you can present qualitative/quantitative data and the resulting strategy. Encourage discussion and feedback. Then go back to the C-team for ...Read More

There are lots of frameworks available for prioritization. The key is to find the one that works the best for your product function and the needs of your stakeholders. Most frameworks are directional and product folks should use product sense and intuition to build a roadmap that makes the most sense for their customers and stakeholders. Some things that I consider Business impact Customer painpoint solved, not all customer pain points are equal Investment to build Cost savings for the business ...Read More

This is possibly a good application of the RACI framework to determine which of your stakeholders have influence vs Control Responsible: Think of your product, engineering, and design leadership. They should have the same goals and priorities as you. Hence their feedback as well as endorsement is critical Accountable: These are your working partners, your engineering, product designer, content strategist. You want to create confidence with this group because they are responsible for delivering y ...Read More

That is a hard situation to be in. Here are some options to try Communicate your roadmap to the executive team organized by segments, showcase what you can prioritize for a segment and what you cant with the latter focusing on multiple priorities across various segments being the primary reason why you can't create focus for your team Create a focus segment for a given planning cycle, eg: Q1 on Segment 1, Q2, Segment 2, etc Identifying common use cases across segments Identifying platform featur ...Read More