What Is the Best Way to Communicate Roadmap Status to Your Team?
This question popped up on one of the product management forums I am part of. What I really love about this is the team wants to share their product roadmap – that’s a great first step.
Sharing your roadmap can only lead to better communication, both internally and externally. Above all, it keeps your team aligned and working towards the same goals and outcomes, so instead of working against each other you’re actually working with each other.
Now there is no wrong or right way when it comes to sharing the product roadmap – the important thing really is that you’re doing it.
At ProdPad we use ProdPad (duh!) and everyone has access to view the product roadmap. The great thing is every user has the ability to set their own views, so whether one is looking to get a really high-level view or a breakdown of the ideas involved, the flexibility is there for each user to set that visibility for themselves.
Sharing your product roadmap with customers
Additionally, we also share our roadmap externally with our customers. This is important for two reasons:
- It helps our customers understand what we’re working on and why
- It helps our team have conversations with our customers about what we’re working on and why
But wait… there’s more
It’s not enough to just make your roadmap visible internally, the next step is to actually talk about it. Our Senior Product Manager, Kirsty, has roadmap catch ups with our customer-facing team every couple of months so they are up to date with how things are moving forward. This isn’t a release or sprint catch up, it’s a strategic chat more than anything, and helps our customer-facing teams plan their own roadmaps around similar strategic initiatives.
Now remember, your product roadmap is about communicating what you’re working on, why, for whom – and above all, how these problems you’re looking to solve are actually going to make an impact for both customers and business. With that in mind, we also have quarterly reviews of how our objectives and key results are doing, so that everyone can be kept up to date about what the impact of the work we are doing is. This is the chance for everyone to focus on those outcomes, and as a team understand our own success.
How do you share your product roadmap? Leave us a comment below and let us know 👇
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