Target Your Roadmap — Continued
Success breeds success. The roadmap that I built for the dev team was good for purpose, so why not repurpose it for the sales team? Also, it took me weeks to get the roadmap into the state it was and I was not about to spend that much time on another version of the roadmap. The one I had ready would just have to do.
Sales people are not developers, and they know it. They are hard negotiators that don’t need to be right to win an argument. Developers care about logic; sales people care about getting to yes. The handicap you face as a product manager is that you spend most of your time with the former and not enough with the latter. The “yes” you get at is not the one you were aiming at. As far as sales people are concerned, that’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
“So, Marco, where’s that roadmap you promised us? We really need it; our customers will not buy into a platform that does not have the next two years of releases plotted out.”
With your blessing, I will skip over a lot of details. No recount of the discussions leading up to this request, no elaboration of arguments in favour or against; just, as they say, the facts.
I looked at my calendar and assessed the benefits of creating a sales roadmap: improve my relationship with the sales team, deepen their understanding of the product, strengthen their ability to engage with their prospects on the problems they are trying to solve instead of just on the features we deliver. Then, the counterargument: it takes more effort.
Having so much to do and so little time, I took to Slack and arranged a roadmap meeting with our sales people. They were excited to hear the product team was ready to share the product roadmap with them. Boy, did I underestimate the shitstorm that was about to break out.
As I stood before my audience, it hit me. “That reservation option will help me close the deal I am negotiating, cool!” (Yes, and do keep in mind the team hasn’t started working on it yet) “Oh man, my prospect is going to love the simplified onboarding registration process!” (Please, no, we are still in Discovery for that feature…) “I’ll call my client right after this meeting; I think I can upsell the premium SAP connector straight away” (That’s in phase 3! We are in phase 2 now, when we intend to roll out the basic version).
Firefighting, herding cats, whack a mole — choose your metaphor; it does not come close to what I had unleashed. I was forced to churn out a dedicated sales roadmap in which I highlighted the items the team was working on at the moment, the items the sales team had requested and were under discovery, and future themes and problem areas that we intended to address. All while mitigating the unrealistic expectations I had set as a result of my laziness effort optimisation.
With time, I managed to repair the loss of trust through delivering on our commitments, careful communication and, yes, a dedicated sales roadmap. Please don’t repeat my failed experiment and respect your sales colleagues for what they are: specialised deal makers that jump on opportunities you’d never dream of. They deserve your commitment.