Product Managers: Share Your Product Roadmap With Customers

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I read an interesting blog post yesterday written for customer success managers.

That post recommended customer success managers to share product roadmaps proactively with their customers.

I believe that idea applies equally, if not more, to Product Managers.

In this post, I’m outlining the reasons why…

Benefits of Sharing Your Product Roadmap With Customers

When Product Management teams share the product roadmap proactively with customers, this results in several benefits to their company. Here are some of the key benefits:

1. Customer Feedback:
   Sharing your product roadmap with customers enables them to give you feedback on the planned features. They often suggest ways you can refine the planned features to better meet their needs. We enjoy this benefit ourselves at Accompa.
2. Enhancement Requests:
   Customers are much more apt to send you enhancement requests if you share the roadmap with them. This is especially true if you make it easy for customers to submit enhancement requests right when they are viewing the roadmap.
   • FYI: Accompa software makes it really easy to gather and manage enhancement requests from customers. You can check out our own feature request form (created using Accompa software) at this link.
3. Competitive Landscape:
   Most of your prospective customers will evaluate other products in addition to yours. When they do this – they are likely to notice features they like but are missing from your product. Often times, these are features you are already planning to add. Sharing your roadmap allows them to know this – and prevents them from incorrectly thinking that your competitors can meet their needs better.
4. Alignment With Customer Needs:
   Last but not least, sharing your product roadmap with customers – and using their feedback to drive it helps you avoid a huge mistake many high-tech companies make. What is this mistake? Product roadmaps driven by the latest technology fads, rather than real-world customer needs.

Due to these reasons, we proactively share our roadmap with all Accompa customers & prospective customers. Our product roadmap (accessible by anyone with an Accompa account) is available at: https://www.accompa.com/roadmap.html

To your success…

Editor’s Note:
Interested in learning more about Accompa? Check out FREE 30-Day trial of Accompa or Sign Up for a Demo.

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Michael Shrivathsan

I'm your author, Michael Shrivathsan, an expert in product management with successful experience at several innovative companies in Silicon Valley, USA over the past two decades. I'm also a USPTO patent recipient. For my day job, I'm the VP of Product Management at Accompa, we make the popular requirements management software used by Product Management, Business Analysis, and related teams.

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