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

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’ ...Read More

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 chan ...Read More

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 q ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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/me ...Read More