Who are all the stakeholders that can provide input to a product roadmap? What are the stage gates to help decide if something should land in the roadmap?

You should try to split your stakeholders into two categories: Primary Stakeholders - The ones which will be directly benefit or impacted by your work. These should not just be your customers who will use the product, but also the teams who will help get this work to the finish line, upper management who need to report this work to higher above. Primary stakeholders can be of various functions - PMs, eng partners, user researchers, design, PMM, leadership Secondary Stakeholders - These are the o ...Read More

Beyond the obvious internal stakeholders – engineering, design, marketing/sales/CS, and leadership – input should also come from customers (/via advisory boards), community forums, and user research, from architects (re platform constraints or future opportunities to scale), and from competitive and market intelligence. So, product roadmap input should come from as many stakeholders, as possible.   What gates an idea should be clear to develop a robust and prioritized roadmap. Some progressive f ...Read More

I like to get as much input as is reasonable both internally and externally. Internal examples of stakeholder input: partnerships, sales, marketing, product support, operations, finance, data science, design, execs…  External sources of roadmap input: press reactions & professional product reviews, app store ratings and reviews, customers support requests, user research, inbound marketing research, and above all behavioral data from your logging/analytics. In terms of gates... during the pla ...Read More

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 ...Read More