Product Roadmaps Relaunched

Chapter 9. Presenting and Sharing Your Roadmap

What you’ll learn in this chapter

Why to share internally

Why to share externally

Risks of sharing

Whether to develop multiple roadmaps

How to present your roadmap to stakeholders

Every stakeholder will benefit from a view into what’s coming, and an opportunity to contribute

One of the chief functions of a product roadmap is to get everyone excited about the future. To accomplish that, you have to tell the story.

By now you know a product roadmap is not a release plan, nor a backlog, nor a list of features. The components we’ve presented give you all the raw materials in place to develop a good roadmap

If you have been following this book chapter by chapter, you now have all the raw materials in place to develop a good roadmap. This chapter will walk you through the process of sharing and presenting it. Once you’ve shared the first cut of your roadmap, as with most iterative processes you will probably need to revisit and revise parts of it, so we’ll also cover what to expect from that step.

Why to Share Your Roadmap Internally

Of course, you’re thinking, at a minimum I have to show my roadmap to my boss, my boss’s boss, and whatever team will be doing the work—and you’re right! However, as we discuss in Chapter 3 and Chapter 8, there are many other people in your organization, outside this core group, who will benefit from seeing your roadmap.

Every department—from sales to marketing, from support to finance, from manufacturing to operations, ...