Quick Tips - April 25, 2007

While there can be real benefits to sharing your product roadmaps with key customers and partners as well as your own sales staff, there are also risks associated with communicating those documents.  However, there are tactics you can use to minimize these risks.  In the Product Strategy Network's roundtables on Product Roadmapping, PSN members shared their practices:

• Roadmaps represent intentions, not commitments.  Avoid letting your roadmap set unrealistic expectations, either among your customers or your own sales staff, by identifying future releases as a plan of record, plan of intent and statement of future direction.
• Use the idea of making shared commitments. If a customer wants you to make a commitment to a future item, ask them to make a commitment to buy it.
• Keep the level of concrete detail to a minimum so that you can buy yourself wiggle room later on in case the specific features offered change as the product approaches launch.
• Limit the horizon of the roadmap to the next two or three releases; don't let your roadmap project too far into the future, at least not the version of it you share with others.
• Present your roadmap during a vision presentation to your customers' executives in person or via a conference call, not in a sales presentation or product demonstration.
• Don't share it in an email or leave it with the customer, which makes it too easy to leak. 
• Even though Non-Disclosure Agreements are often used, don't assume that your roadmap is safe from being leaked to others, including to your competitors.  Craft it on the assumption that your roadmap will find its way into your competitor's hands.
• Do not include cost information in the roadmap; it can reveal more to others about your internal operations and competitive posture than your may have realized.
• To minimize the risk of having your roadmap unintentionally dissuade a customer from buying your current product, provide ‘bridge' programs which would allow them to change over later at a known price.
• Provide your sales team with appropriate incentives to sell your current product instead of the one in your roadmap that you hope to have available for sale at some later time.
• To reduce the likelihood of a major prospective customer shrugging off your new product roadmap with a ‘so what?' response, have your company's most passionate advocate deliver the presentation and present it first to lesser customers, then study their reactions and work your way up to key customers. 

See other Quick Tips for product roadmapping effectively:

Benefits of sharing your product roadmap

Making product roadmapping work for your business

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