Forecasting Product Deliverables

Forecasting product deliverable dates is often a prickly topic and a discipline that teams even disregarded as valuable. I advocate that forecasting is an incredibly necessary discipline that drives a better whole-product experience for customers by aligning internal teams (Marketing, Sales, Product, Technical Support) and external teams (Customers, Partners, resellers) around the value you're providing. Product simply can not behave independently and scale without considering the entire team it takes to share the good news with customers that are clamoring for help in the problems they are experiencing and solving with your product.

I once had a conversation with a Sales leader who shared some very applicable wisdom. Forecasting is a core part of a Sales leader responsibility. They joined the company and spent about 6 months simply learning process and gathering necessary data to build their forecast. They learned what they could regarding how the team attracted new customers, sold to existing customers, and renewed existing customers. After spending that time learning, they began sharing their forecast to the executive team. Arguably a high-stakes audience to share your forecast.

And you know what; they were off by a LOT! Their first few quarterly forecasts were off 30%! To put that into product terms; they were off by 4 months on a 12 month roadmap!

But they didn't stop them from delivering and then improving. They continued learning process and learning where they can improve their behaviors to build a better forecast. They understood problem areas and changes they could enact to gather better day. They worked with their leaders to drive consistent behaviors and communicated why those behaviors mattered. Ship, reflect, implement a change, repeat. The result was an incredible precision and were delivering forecasts within a 1% the last time I checked. I am sure it's gotten even better.

Leverage this same mindset as you're building your roadmap and considering communicating it out to customers. While you may start out with a large margin of error, spend the time to sit with your team to reflect, implement change, and try again.

As a starting point, review your roadmap over the next 3 months. Then spend 3 months writing down every change, the cause for the change, and if that was a proactive change or a reactive one. At the end of that 3 months, you'll see a list of changes you made reactively. Those are your target areas with the biggest opportunity for improvement in forecasting.

While it may seem painful at first, you will see a direct impact to your top-line sales as you improve the whole-product experience and align teams across all departments across the entire customer lifecycle. You'll see higher lead gen, a higher conversion rate driving an increase in revenue, increased usage of product with decreased escalated tickets as Support teams are better prepared.

Have you had a similar experience?