It’s that time of year…

With EOY quickly approaching, many product management teams are scrambling to determine what can still be delivered versus deferred to 2023.

As you revise and update your roadmaps, consider:

Highlighting deliveries, not just plans.

Great roadmaps don't just highlight features a quarter or two out of reach. You've got to also show—by delivering—that what you're promising will actually happen. This is especially crucial for your sales and customer success teams when they're following up with key prospects and landed clients. Your roadmap, and its evolution over time, plays a big part in building trust internally and externally.

Aligning features with outcomes.

It's never about the features. Or even really just about benefits. It's about the outcomes. The "so what." This is true both for how your delivery will help customers accomplish THEIR business objectives, as well as how they enable the larger priorities of YOUR organization. This is where product marketing can help—both as features are being considered, as well as as the roadmap evolves over time.

Making sure it tells a story your market needs to hear.

I've been in the meetings where someone wants a feature listed because a) we can do it and b) it's cool. Nowhere in there was the fact that the market was asking for it, or it solved an identified market need in an innovative way. It should be about how these things fit in with your larger strategy, and how that benefits your served market in key ways. And if something doesn't do either of those things, then why are you spending resources on it?

And finally, it's important to remember this:

A roadmap isn’t your GTM plan.

Just because engineering and QA is complete on an item doesn't make it ready for release. All stakeholders within your organization will see your roadmap differently. Make sure everyone is aligned on what the milestones mean on your roadmap and how they connect with and feed into stages of GTM readiness.