How do you walk the line of allowing other teams input into the roadmap without allowing them to dictate roadmap priorities?

My first principle when it comes to roadmaps is “transparency.” Being transparent about priorities, what’s being prioritized, what’s not being prioritized and WHY makes a massive difference.

There are plenty of SaaS solutions that are great for this, but in the old days we used a simple Excel spreadsheet and that’s still good enough today. Define a prioritization framework – pick some high level business objectives you want to achieve – and align clear, objective criteria around them. Score every roadmap item on those criteria, trade off against LOE, and welcome debate. Show why you’re prioritizing what you are

And be flexible -you’re going to make mistakes and it’s ok to be corrected. In fact it’s a desired outcome – it’s only going to get stronger the more eyes there are on it.

Wow, great question. The best roadmaps are ones that contain a lot of feedback, iteration, and discussion with the company as well as external customers/stakeholders. I have seen a couple of strategies applied to ensure priorities for the roadmap are clear.

1. Identify the top metric/business result you are influencing.

   1. This will help drive the discussion. Anything that needs to get added should have a tie back to this metric

2. Have percentages for types of scope on the roadmap and communicate these percentages in advance so stakeholders understand there is a limited amount of scope that can be delivered in a given time frame

3. Be transparent about how something gets on the roadmap

   1. Most of my roadmaps are based on two things: data experiments or validation with customers/end users. The items with customer insights are to the roadmap if a significant portion are impacted or there is a material impact to the metric in #1 above.

Generally, with these three items known in advance, your stakeholders will be able to understand and contribute while being aware that their request may not fit in the broader course.