How product managers can get buy-in for roadmaps
Bring your stakeholders along for the journey with these four steps to getting roadmap buy-in.
Adil Tobaa
Product Manager at Coda
How product managers can get buy-in for roadmaps
By Adil Tobaa
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Blog > Product teams · 5 min read
The 4 I's: A foolproof path to roadmap alignment.
The process of gaining buy-in for your roadmap begins well before you start writing it down. First, you need an agreed north star for your team or product area, so everyone understands what you’re trying to achieve. You’ll also need an agreed framework for prioritizing what to build. Here’s a great rundown of some common ones you can use, including RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) and the Kano model. Once your team and stakeholders agree on your north star and prioritization framework, it’s time to start building the roadmap. These steps—which we call the “four ‘I’s”—will help you get buy-in along the way:- Intake: Understand who your stakeholders are and what they care about.
- Investigate: Turn the long list into a shortlist with your team.
- Invite: Get input and feedback from your stakeholders.
- Inform: Roadshow your roadmap and inspire the team.
1. Intake: Understand who your stakeholders are and what they care about.
There are lots of people inside and outside of your immediate team who will have opinions about what should be on it. In most cases, it’s not realistic to talk to everyone, but you should know who your key stakeholders are—the ones you need to deliver on the roadmap, the ones who can veto or block your plans, and the ones who can help evangelize it with others—and what they care about. Make a list, and then make the effort to build relationships with each person. Ideally, this should be something you do continuously, not just the week before the roadmap is due—but if not, now’s the time to start. Try to meet with your stakeholders on a regular basis and ask them questions about their goals, what they’re excited about, and what challenges their team is facing. Be curious and open, listen to their ideas and feedback, and collaborate on how they can best partner with you. This builds trust and shows them you value their opinion, which goes a long way to helping get buy-in further down the road. Hearing the perspectives of your different stakeholders will also help you develop a deeper understanding of your customers, market, and business—which ultimately helps you make better, more informed roadmapping decisions. One way to encourage open communication and collect ideas from your stakeholders is a ritual we call “Garden Parties.” This is a monthly pitch session where people in any role can share ideas that excite them, which you can then evaluate and prioritize. Take a look at this template to try it out. And remember, great ideas can come from anywhere!2. Investigate: Turn the long list into a shortlist with your team.
You probably know that it’s rare to have too few product ideas. Instead, you likely have a long list of feature requests from customers, your sales team, leadership, partners, and other teams—not to mention your own. There will usually be far more than you can realistically build, so you’ll need to whittle down this long list to a shorter, more viable one. Start by using the framework you established at the beginning and do a “quick and dirty” evaluation against the criteria. Get data where you can, but don’t stress about perfection at this stage. The goal here is to discard ideas that aren’t viable and get to a rough first draft of the roadmap but with plenty of flexibility and wiggle room for changes (which will be important for the next step)! This process should include your immediate team, including engineers, designers, product marketers, and other PMs working on your product area. This group not only has useful knowledge but is also key to bringing this roadmap to life—getting them involved from the start will help build a sense of ownership and commitment. If you have a particularly large team or are working across multiple product areas, you may need to work with just the leaders rather than everyone. If that’s the case, it’s still a good idea to give the wider team visibility into what is happening and how decisions are being made.3. Invite: Get input and feedback from your stakeholders.
Now that you have your roadmap v1, it’s time to get your other stakeholders involved. You already know who those people are, so it’s time to host a roadmap review session to get their feedback. Be sure to remind everyone of the relevant context including the strategy, vision, and goals, as well as the framework you’re using to prioritize. You can do this live at the start of the review session or share it ahead of time as a pre-read, so people can digest and gather their thoughts beforehand. We like to use an interactive “I’ve finished reading” button at the end of our pre-read docs, so we know whether we need to recap context at the start or if we can jump right in. You can even ask for sentiment too, to get a sense of how people are feeling about the plan. Take a look at how Figma does this for more efficient meetings, or try out this writeups template. Rather than just opening up the discussion with “Any thoughts?,” add some structure to the session, otherwise you may end up down a rabbit hole on one particular idea or the loudest voices may dominate. We love using this $100 voting exercise, which forces everyone to choose what they most care about—and how strongly they feel about it—for a more inclusive and focused conversation. It might take several rounds of iteration as you take in feedback, refine, and re-share. Set expectations about how many rounds there will be. If there are areas that need specific focus—an idea that needs re-scoping or additional research, for example—you can create a mutual action plan or shared goal with the relevant stakeholders to work together on resolving it.4. Inform: Roadshow your roadmap and inspire the team.
Once you’ve taken in all the feedback from your stakeholders, it’s time to finalize the roadmap and start sharing it more widely. The goal here is threefold:1. Make sure everyone knows the plan.
Lay out your roadmap in a visual way that’s clear and easy to understand, and put it somewhere everyone can easily find it, like in your team hub. There are many ways to structure roadmaps, such as by theme or workstream, so explore what works best for you. Product School has a fantastic template you can use to house all your team roadmaps in one place. Or you can try out this simple visual timeline or this roadmap with a dashboard to show progress against plans. Then, share it far and wide. We’ve found making use of existing forums particularly effective, as these already have a captive audience. Use your company all-hands meetings, sales kickoffs, specific Slack channels, internal newsletters, or join other teams’ weekly meetings as a guest spot. Make sure to customize the content to each group and focus on what they care about most (which you should know from step one!). And remember that repetition is key—share in multiple channels and at different times, making sure it’s delivered at relevant times so it doesn’t feel spammy.2. Share the why.
Gaining buy-in for a plan is much easier if people understand the rationale behind it. When evangelizing your roadmap, share how decisions were made (and by whom), the framework used for prioritizing, and the data you used to evaluate. And don’t just share a list of features without context—focus on impact, such as the desired outcome for your customers and the business. Roadmaps from GitLab and Schoolhouseworld.com are great examples that explain both the what and the why. You might also find it helpful to call out things you decided not to do and explain why, so people aren’t left wondering, “But what about Z?” If you receive questions or feedback, make sure to acknowledge it, reiterate the rationale where needed, and take the feedback on board for next time.3. Build hype.
A trap many of us fall into is overwhelming people with a ton of data and logic to justify our decisions. But while data is important, telling a great story is just as crucial—if not more so—to get people excited and on board. Paint the bigger picture for people about why this roadmap will be impactful. Bring the ideas to life with examples, visuals, and customer feedback quotes. Explain how this roadmap will deliver value—to your customers, to the business, and to them personally. You may need to customize this to different audiences. For example, when talking to the sales team, you might focus on how these features will help them differentiate the product and close more deals. Or for other PMs, you might focus on how this plan opens up or aligns with opportunities for their own product areas. And remember, be confident, be enthusiastic, and show your own excitement. This is critical for buy-in and for building trust—if you’re not excited, why should they be?Remember the four I's for seamless roadmap consensus.
Following these four steps will help you deliver a roadmap that everyone is bought into and excited to support. While it might be easier (and tempting!) to just pull together a plan with your team and hope no one questions it, getting stakeholders involved in the process reduces the risk of having to pivot or spend time justifying it later down the road. When you have full buy-in, you can instead focus on what you do best: delivering great products! If you’d like to get more tips, advice, and templates like this, take a look at our Ultimate Handbook for Product Teams by Coda CPO, Lane Shackleton.Related posts
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