In what ways can product marketing share the roadmap externally?

Sharing the product roadmap externally is a great way to share the company's vision, investment in innovation, and upcoming features to get prospects and customers excited about the potential. It can be a strong selling tool to get prospects on board and a resource to get current customers to invest more. What's important is that the roadmap isn't standing on it own, but partnered with an overall vision to show how product efforts later up to a great vision. This is where Product Marketing can play a strong role in storytelling and positioning to bring it all together. I've seen this executed successfully at customer events, executive briefings, and executive prospect closing meetings. Side note, also a great recruiting tool to close potential candidates. 

All that said, you need to be thoughtful in sharing the roadmap to avoid any implications to press from product launches, have customers / prospects sign NDAs when needed, and align when, with who, and how you share the information. Your legal and comms teams will thank you. 

Sharing roadmap is essential for any tech company, and I'm a firm believer of sharing more information with customers brings more trust, and better relationships. Currently at Miro, we share our roadmap in a monthly webinar that we give to our existing customers. This is a closed webinar and invitation only so we are more free to discuss what's coming without worrying about affecting revrec.

We also have a more polished customer facing roadmap, with things on it that we are more certain are coming, this is shared with prospects and existing customers.

Finally we run CABs- customer advisory boards, where we also share external roadmaps with customers.

There are a couple of different ways to share a roadmap externally. Over the course of my career at various different companies. I've done this a few different ways:

• Publish on website: For companies that release quickly having an external roadmap on their website is a great way to show how customers can expect the product to evolve month over month and where you're putting immediate investments. This is typically more something an early stage start-up would do to help validate their value prop and messaging.

• Sales Asset: For larger companies that have longer sales cycles, PMM teams (in partnership with PM) create external facing roadmaps that are shared as part of the sales process or customer success engagements to build trust with current and prospective customers and get buy-in on future vision and priorities.

• Webinars: For companies that don't want to publish online but create roadmaps as sales assets, we've hosted customer and partner facing roadmap webinars where we share what's coming, typically in one year segments. This again allows us to create a consistent drumbeat with the audiences we want to build trust and take on our product journey.

Managing expectations is the toughest challenge of sharing a roadmap. Following a Now, Next, Later model is a great way to share a roadmap while not committing to explicit features if you're not ready to. 

NOW should cover the most immediate roadmap deliverables. You can be a bit more liberal with who you share this with. Clients and prospects should be privvy to this information and it should include the most granular area of focus and detail specific deliverables with reliable dates. 

NEXT should cover near term and open up the area of focus slightly wider. The PM team likely has an idea of what these feature will be, but the scope may stil be vague. It's critical that you share this information with a Safe Harbor statement and alignment with your clients and prospects that these are more general themes that may be subject to change. 

LATER encompasses your larger themes and visionary roadmap. Share this at conferences, events, in QBRs, and with prospects but always keep it high level. This bucket is broad & flexible.