How do you communicate and justify changes or delays in your product roadmap?

A product roadmap is like a guidebook that helps product managers keep track of progress, making sure they're on the right track, and keeping everyone aligned with the project working towards the same goals. By updating the roadmap regularly with new information and feedback, they can make sure they're creating a vision that meets the customers' needs and the most important features are given priority. This way, the team can focus on delivering the best product at the right time, increasing their chances of generating customer delight.

Roadmap changes are inevitable. Periodic and Proactive Review and Update of the Roadmap by product team ensures engagement and alignment with all stakeholders, eg. sales, customer success, support and preempts friction points. 1. Due to specific customer feedback- engaging early to discover these changes are congruent with other customers or not. 2. Change in Market Trends and Business Goals - Business goals reflect Market trends most of the time. Hence, the periodic engagement is focussed on bringing unanimity. 3. Changes due to Internal challenges - Limits of current architecture, internal chaos like significant attrition in Product dev teams, resource shortage due to firefighting etc. Periodic review helps break the bad news early.

It depends on the delivery cadence. If your org is delivering once in many months (e.g. in case the Org is following a waterfall due to the nature of the product), You can break the Roadmap updates into two categories: 1. Event Driven - Before every release 2. Change driven - if there are significant changes that require conveying. If the release is too frequent, A regular bi-weekly or Monthly roadmap sync meeting should be sufficient in most cases.

In the contemporary fast-paced Product Management arena, It just not possible to limit the no. of times roadmaps are updated and no. of people doing those updates. Normally, there are many Product Managers managing a part and owning it. However, for the sake of Consumers of the roadmap, the update should be provided in such a way that it is unambiguously clear on : 1. What has Changed - Scope or Timeline of an existing item or addition of a new Item. 2. Why the change was inevitable - business justification to ensure roadmap is sacrosanct and not in constant churn. 3. Who changed it - to hear it from Horse's mouth. 4. What is the impact - In terms of specific customers, communication strategy, GTM, documentation updates etc.

In my experience, it is best for a roadmap to contain some sort of warning to make it clear to all stakeholders and customers that anything in the roadmap is subject to change without notice. This to a reasonable extent will help protect one from accusations of broken promises; it also protects one's customer by making it clear that change is possible, even likely.

Two things are critical : Intent of the Change and the how it is going to be Communicated. There was a time when Roadmaps were only to the eyes of few and PMs were mostly using MS Excel for internal and Powerpoints for external and exec level Roadmap presentations. However, these are not scalable and end up causing insurmountable debt of changes over time. To manage roadmap changes and highlight attention seeking areas like delays, drops, descoping etc., we must use due collaboration tools with the necessary change, privilege, and versioning control. Thankfully, there are plenty of options to use a SaaS-based Roadmap tool to do that like Aha, Product Plan, Jira roadmap etc.