Whats an example of a time you successfully influenced the roadmap w/ a net new product idea? What worked well?

A few themes come to mind when thinking about influencing a product roadmap:

1. Understand business impact: how does your idea or recommendation impact the company at large? Is there a shared business goal that other teams can get behind in hearing your proposal? Laddering up to shared objectives creates a path of less resistance.

2. Understand customer/industry impact: what impact will this have on your customers? Have you talked to any customers to provide proof points? Or at least, work with key sellers in your Revenue Org to further validate? This is critical to ensuring you have support and a way to back up your thinking.

3. Acknowledge trade-offs: nothing comes for free. Acknowledging that there might be trade-offs and being willing to partner with your R&D teams to weigh those pros/cons will make them more receptive to your proposal. Ultimately, when a leader is having to make the decision on this idea it'll be important that they understand the risks involved as well.

Now to answer the question more directly, I've seen this work well for prioritizing new integrations on our product roadmap and even more recently with where to invest our efforts in AI opportunities for this year. I've also been on the losing end but through both the wins and losses, the (3) steps above helped me put my best foot forward and have a collective team effort to back it up.