Great post, Sam! I really love the examples you used. I’m curious about your thoughts on how to balance and manage a featureless roadmap in the B2B and enterprise space. At Instacart, we also have an enterprise business, and we work with some of the largest grocers in the U.S. A recurring challenge we face is that high-priority feature requests from major retailers often consume a significant portion of our roadmap. Currently, I’m adding buffers to account for these unknowns. What are your thoughts on other approaches?
That's a good call out Wayne. The featureless roadmap is equally powerful in B2B but requires some nuanced adjustments due to the complexity of stakeholders, customer commitments, and longer sales cycles. Here's how it would change:
1. The roadmap is tightly aligned with your business objectives and internal KPIs, so your themes should focus on solving high-impact business problems, e.g. enhancing data security.
2. Enterprise customers often expect visibility into your roadmap and specific feature commitments, especially if features are part of contractual obligations. So, I would frame it to communicate outcomes. E.g. instead of promising features like "custom reporting tools," align on goals like"enhance analytics capabilities" and work collaboratively with customers to determine the best ways to achieve these outcomes.
3. There are typically multiple layers of stakeholders in a B2B environment. Involving these stakeholders early in the roadmap planning process helps build buy-in for the featureless approach, ensuring everyone is aligned on strategic goals rather than micromanaging individual features.
4. The longer product cycles nature of B2B mean that outcomes need to be tracked and measured over time. A featureless roadmap enables you to pivot quickly if something isn't working, without being locked into rigid feature commitments. Themes can adapt as enterprise priorities shift, offering greater flexibility in responding to changes.
Great post, Sam! I really love the examples you used. I’m curious about your thoughts on how to balance and manage a featureless roadmap in the B2B and enterprise space. At Instacart, we also have an enterprise business, and we work with some of the largest grocers in the U.S. A recurring challenge we face is that high-priority feature requests from major retailers often consume a significant portion of our roadmap. Currently, I’m adding buffers to account for these unknowns. What are your thoughts on other approaches?
That's a good call out Wayne. The featureless roadmap is equally powerful in B2B but requires some nuanced adjustments due to the complexity of stakeholders, customer commitments, and longer sales cycles. Here's how it would change:
1. The roadmap is tightly aligned with your business objectives and internal KPIs, so your themes should focus on solving high-impact business problems, e.g. enhancing data security.
2. Enterprise customers often expect visibility into your roadmap and specific feature commitments, especially if features are part of contractual obligations. So, I would frame it to communicate outcomes. E.g. instead of promising features like "custom reporting tools," align on goals like"enhance analytics capabilities" and work collaboratively with customers to determine the best ways to achieve these outcomes.
3. There are typically multiple layers of stakeholders in a B2B environment. Involving these stakeholders early in the roadmap planning process helps build buy-in for the featureless approach, ensuring everyone is aligned on strategic goals rather than micromanaging individual features.
4. The longer product cycles nature of B2B mean that outcomes need to be tracked and measured over time. A featureless roadmap enables you to pivot quickly if something isn't working, without being locked into rigid feature commitments. Themes can adapt as enterprise priorities shift, offering greater flexibility in responding to changes.
Great suggestions to for product managers to take control of their outcomes!