AMA: Zoom Head of Product Operations, Julie Lam on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

One best practice Product Management team should institute is a Product Strategy with details on how each Product team will execute against the strategy. This will allow the product teams to align their roadmaps to the strategy. Products teams should also interlock with Sales team to ensure their roadmaps also meet customer demands.

Roadmap items are execution against product strategy. Therefore, considerations for prioritizing roadmap items should include (1) support of the overall strategy, (2) innovation, and (3) delivering against customers' needs. One is not more important than the other; rather it's an aggregate of the these considerations.

Input from customer facing teams such as Sales, Support and CSM are helpful to the product roadmap as they represent the input/requests from customers. Additionally, getting alignment with Engineering and Design leads is important to understanding feasibility and trade-offs that will impact product roadmap. Less about stage gates, more about grooming backlog and assigning attributes to each feature to help prioritize the features. Attributes can be weighted and aggregated. For example, a feature might be assigned 3-4 attributes (e.g. customer reach, ease of implementation, adoption impact) which can roll up to a score. Then each team decides where the cutline is (i.e. which features with scores higher than X will be prioritized for upcoming releasing).

Product team work with Product Marketing to showcase the roadmap and align the messaging. Product Marketing team should be elevating the messaging pre-launch, at launch and post-launch (to ensure the message is resonating with customers). Depending on the organization, some Product Marketing teams work with Product team on customer facing demos and vignettes.

Prioritization of roadmap is not solely focused on sales' requests; though requests from Sales are important as they represent the asks from customers. In order to get autonomy on prioritizing roadmap items, one should consider interlocking w/ sales on customer requests (potential revenue) and providing Sales with visibility of innovation as well as alignment to overarching strategy.

Communication of roadmap with internal teams is important to ensure alignment of the vision and priorities. On an annual basis, Product org should share the strategy and high level roadmap. On a quarterly basis, product teams should share updates to roadmap based on what has been delivered and what is planned for upcoming quarters.