As a product marketer, when and how do you communicate your product roadmap to both active and prospective customers?

This would depend on your goals. Do you want to share the roadmap to get feedback or do you want to share the roadmap to give customers insight into your vision and upcoming plans. Also, think about what kind of expectations your customers have from you and what kind of expectations do you want them to have?

In general, if you are in a sales based business, your customers will most likely expect to have regular access to this information. A great way to preview the roadmap is part of annual or quarterly account health checks. In the past I’ve had a section in the sales deck and we’ve also recorded videos with our PMs covering high level plans.

If your company has a self-service model you probably have a group of vocal power users who have submitted feature requests and feedback. In this case, I recommend establishing some sort of a community space where you can share roadmap updates so they know you are taking their input seriously. And of course, if your company hosts events/conferences this is also a great place to preview what’s coming for you in the coming year.

This is always a bit of a dance, I'd say we've fluctuated over time with being better at sharing things in advance vs. more so communicating a changelog of features we've added over time. In my eyes, this often comes back to who owns this type of communication, and it can sometimes be a bit of a hot potato between PMs and PMMs.

The needs for these changes being communicated are also different within our userbase. Understandably, some of our larger-scale clients and admins need to know about changes before they roll-out so that they can plan accordingly. One way we've found is good to communicate about upcoming roadmap changes is to create a section on our blog for product-specific updates - there we share things that are coming, beta programs, and announce new features that are live for everybody. These posts are typically shared in our bi-monthly newsletters that is sent to millions of users each month 💌.

To be totally honest I think we've still got room to grow here and I'd love to hear from people who feel like they are doing this really well!

Discussing the roadmap with customers is a critical step in product development because it helps validate and clarify your strategy.

It’s tough to give a one-size fits all rule for when to share the product roadmap as it depends on the industry, customer maturity, segment, and numerous other factors. For example, at Zendesk, we sell to customer service and sales leaders and their time horizon is in the 6-12 month range. That is, they are budgeting and planning at least a year in advance. So, it’s important that we show them what’s coming in (roughly) that timeframe.

How the roadmap is communicated depends on the size of the customer and your relationship with them. For smaller customers and prospects we have a quarterly webinar which does a look back and look ahead of all the product releases. This is a scalable forum for customers to see everything we’ve built and ask questions on what’s coming. For larger customers, we partner with Sales and Customer Success to do roadmap walkthroughs.

Finally, it’s rare to show large prospective customers a detailed roadmap. We will explain our long term goals and vision, but getting into the minutiae of individual features is usually not relevant for prospects.

There's no right or wrong answer here. Really depends on your organization's current priorities. For example, if you're going hard in a new product direction, it may make sense to share a lot more about what they should expect over the next 6-12 months than you typically would.

That being said, here's my general guidance under normal circumstances.

Market overall: signal where you're going by talking about problems you're focused on solving (not specific features you're building) in the short/medium-term.

Active customers and prospects: build on the above by sharing specific features coming to the product in the next quarter. This should help retain some customers who may have otherwise churned or close a new customer who would've otherwise went with a competitor. If a customer or prospect has a specific need/concern that is expected to be addressed in the next 6-12 months, share it. Just do so with the caveat that while planned, things can change. In short, don't overpromise.

Our team takes it seriously and does a great job of making sure the product roadmap is accurate, updated regularly and communicated with our customers in a timely manner.

It is critical to understand this deeply as it impacts all aspects of product marketing and if done well can help increase customer satisfaction and pipeline. Ultimately knowing the future of the product before the customer does and being able to layout what the future looks like can be one of your biggest superpowers. After it’s not just called marketing, it’s product marketing.