Product Roadmap

Overview

Giving visibility & aligning on the roadmap is hard and time-consuming. Not only it's something we do often, it results in a lot of back-and-forths. Product teams deal with different stakeholders, each one with a stake in the roadmap.

Leadership pushes for strategic features that better position the company in the market.

Sales ask for the ones that allow them to close more deals.

Customer Success will do everything to renew key accounts.

Aligning on the Product roadmap is a lot like arbitrage. How to make the life of everyone easier?

Turning to asynchronous video collaboration.

You will provide more context and transparency to the requests made. And by enabling a public forum, you also foster empathy among teams. Without back-to-back meetings.

When to use the Roadmap Alignment Playbook

Two types of teams will get the most value out of an asynchronous Roadmap alignment:

• Distributed teams: we all know how hard it is to find a meeting slot across time zones. And even if your team does overlap for a couple of hours, it’s still hard to coordinate agendas so everyone can meet.
• Large teams: a squad in a medium-large company can easily reach 8-10 people, including Product Managers, Product Designers, Software Engineers, QA, Data Analysts, etc. And we’re not even including here other business stakeholders. Or presenting the Roadmap to the entire company. That’s another level of calendar Tetris.

How to get started

Record your proposal

Set the stage for your audience. Why did you decide on these items? How will they impact company metrics?  What data do you have to support your assumptions? It’s important to give this context from the start to speed up the process. That’s what others will ask you, so better to answer them upfront.

When recording your claap, we recommend having supporting documents open in different browser tabs. This way, you can easily switch tabs while recording as you walk them through your proposal and the data that supports it.

💡 Tip: when choosing recording mode, select full screen or window to enable tab switching

Ask for feedback

Make it easier to give feedback: highlight the moments in the video where you expect feedback and mention the right people, so they know their input is required.

Reply to comments

As feedback starts coming in, ensure you clarify doubts, answer questions, and move forward with decisions. Organize discussions in threads to keep topics separated and resolve threads once a decision is made.

💡 Read more: Mentioning people on a claap.

Move to execution

Congrats! Final version is ready 🙂

Before moving to your next project, add a label to your claap to make it clear discussion time is over and now it’s time to start executing.

💡 Read more: how to use labels.

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