How do you explain product road map trade-offs to senior management?

1 Understand their perspective

Before you present your road map trade-offs to senior management, you need to understand their perspective and goals. What are they most concerned about? What are their key performance indicators (KPIs) and success metrics? How do they perceive the value and impact of your product? How do they align with the company's vision and strategy? By understanding their perspective, you can tailor your message and language to resonate with them and address their pain points and interests.

2 Focus on outcomes and benefits

When you explain your road map trade-offs, you should focus on the outcomes and benefits of your decisions, not just the features and tasks. For example, instead of saying "we decided to prioritize feature A over feature B because it has more user requests", you can say "we decided to prioritize feature A over feature B because it will increase user retention and engagement, which are critical for our growth and revenue". By focusing on outcomes and benefits, you can show senior management how your road map trade-offs support the product's value proposition and the company's objectives.

3 Provide data and evidence

Another way to explain your road map trade-offs is to provide data and evidence to back up your choices. Data and evidence can include user feedback, market research, competitive analysis, user testing, experiments, analytics, and so on. By providing data and evidence, you can demonstrate that your road map trade-offs are based on facts and insights, not assumptions and opinions. You can also use data and evidence to quantify the impact and risks of your trade-offs, and to show how you measure and validate your results.

4 Explain your criteria and process

Besides providing data and evidence, you should also explain your criteria and process for making your road map trade-offs. What factors did you consider when making your trade-offs? How did you weigh them against each other? How did you involve and collaborate with other stakeholders, such as developers, designers, customers, and users? How did you handle uncertainties and dependencies? By explaining your criteria and process, you can show senior management that your road map trade-offs are transparent and consistent, and that you followed a structured and rational approach.

5 Anticipate and address objections

Finally, you should anticipate and address any potential objections or questions that senior management might have about your road map trade-offs. For example, they might ask why you did not include a certain feature or request, or how you will handle a change in the market or customer needs. To anticipate and address these objections, you should prepare some scenarios and responses in advance, and be ready to explain your rationale and alternatives. You should also acknowledge any limitations or trade-offs that you made, and how you plan to mitigate or overcome them.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?