Customer Roadmap

Sharing the Product Roadmap with Customers

In Agile, Business Analysis, Marketing, Product Management, Product Management Facts, product manager, Product Marketing, Product Owner, Product Teams, Project Management, Sales, Scrum, Take Charge Product Management, The Study of Product Team Performance, User Experience by [email protected]

The most recent Global Study of Product Team Performance provided insight into corporate practice in two key areas:

  • When to share the tactical product roadmap with customers and customer-facing employees
  • The reporting structure of the user experience group

Let’s take a look at survey responses.

Question: How far into the future does your tactical product roadmap illustrate future development activities when shared with customers! (Check one.)

Response Percentage
1 month 5.2%
3 months 20.2%
6 months 24.3%
12 months 20.6%
Over 12 months 9.9%
We don’t share the product roadmap with customers 19.8%

 

Delving Into Product Roadmap Responses

Approaches to sharing product information with customer-facing employees and customers vary. That’s especially true when it comes to how far out they are willing to share. The highest percentage of respondents (24.3%) indicated that their companies were willing to share information six months out. Closely following that are 12 months out with 20.6% of responses and three months out at 20.2%. The answer garnering the lowest response was one month out at 5.2%. Nearly as low (9.9%) was the response indicating that a company shares the product roadmap more than 12 months out. Nearly 20% of respondents indicated that their organizations do not share their product roadmap with customers as all.

 

Question: User experience is becoming increasingly important to the design and development of successful products. Where does user experience report in your organization?

Response Percentage
Marketing 6.7%
Product Management 30.8%
Chief Product Officer 10.7%
Technology Architecture, Product Architecture or similar 10.7%
Engineering, Development, Technology or similar 30.0%
Other 11.1%

 

Drilling Down

Two survey answers received the highest percentage of responses to this question. Almost equal in number, each garnering almost a third of responses, reveal that most user experience teams report to either Product Management (30.8%) or to Engineering, Development, Technology or a similar segment (30.0%). Technology Architecture, Product Architecture, or similar areas and the Chief Product Officer each received just 10.7% of responses. Only 6.7% of respondents named Marketing as the department to which the User Experience team reports.

Coming Up

The Global Study of Product Team Performance provides a treasure trove of insight into how organizations operate and what distinguishes the most productive teams from those that are performing less successfully.

Next week we’ll consider what is the most effective place for the user experience team to report and the most effective size of a core user experience design group.

 

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