Is it a good idea to have a PUBLIC roadmap?
Nicole Ogloza
24 replies
I'm not worried about stealing the ideas, (if you're an entrepreneur and someone copies your idea or steals it, you should be ready for the competition), but with a roadmap, do you think a lot of interested followers/onlookers would love to have something like that to show whats coming next for your product? If is that not a useful idea/tool to get the word about your features?
If anyone has feedback on what has worked for them, updating their followers/users, let me know what has worked for you, if it's not a public roadmap!
Replies
Fabian Maume@fabian_maume
Warmup Inbox
We are using FeedBear to manage our roadmap, and it gives us nice insights to priorities what to build with QApop.
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@fabian_maume Have you ever had trouble keeping up with the roadmap that the public awaits so much? Have you been able to drive meaningful engagement from these public roadmaps?
what is the most beneficial thing to you, as to why you have a public roadmap? How do you generally know what to put in the roadmap for the public, versus what you keep protected?
Warmup Inbox
@nicole_ogloza The main benefit is to have information about what to build next.
All feature we are considering are listed on our public roadmap. If you need to keep your feature ideas to protect your business you have some serious issue. Once the you release the feature it will be public anyway. You need to protect your business somewhere else, for example by building up some loyal audience.
I feel like coarse-grained public roadmap is a balanced solution. On one hand, you don’t have to be too concerned failing the deadline, since the deadlines themselves are more abstract.
On the other hand, the audience still gets the idea of the upcoming milestones. In fact, I don’t think people are generally interested to see detailed plans.
@yuryfication detailed plans might also be beneficial to competitors trying to see how they can make their own product better based on the roadmap. thanks for sharing!
@nicole_ogloza just stumbled upon a cool implementation of a public roadmap - https://www.softr.io/roadmap
I think it's best practice to have one available - especially early on it can help serve as a FAQ page for people wondering about coming features. It also gives you another route to promoting transparency and trust through your brand.
@paul_vanzandt any places where you would advise posting it for the public? whether is be on discord or other groups, and then a place for targeted groups?
@nicole_ogloza I think sharing it within your communities is smart(Slack, PH, Discord, etc.), and providing it on your website (via a Notion Link) is also a great idea!
AnnounceKit
Maybe for enterprise-level product ideas, it might cause what you are concerned about.
But, especially for SaaS businesses, it really affects customer decisions positively to see the team working, planning new features, and caring about user ideas. It also represents the value and direction of a product. We've experienced the effect personally with our business, and using VoteKit for these purposes 🤓
I see a problem related to being "forced" to finish some features because you have planned them and some customers may wait for them.
It may also be a problem when things don't go as planned and you have a delay.
@maciej_cupial @hakim_elakhrass i agree. some of the people in this comments section mentioned that same from an accountability standpoint
Unless it is a case where you are trying to hide information from other competitors I always think its a good idea. The accountability it adds is huge. Obviously this is a double edged sword since now when you do not meet deadlines it will have bigger consequences then if it was simply an internal deadline. But go big or go home 😊
@jokubas_lape Right now we have a bit of a mix at SigmaOS. We do not have much of a roadmap at all. We obviously have plans but nothing concrete. I record every bit of feedback and feauture requests from out users on our community where they can upvote and comment on feedbacks. It is at sigmaos.com/community, check it out if you’re curious how it works. Then every 2 weeks we sprint plan based off the most requested issues. We rarely work on tasks if it is not something are users have noticed or seem to want.
@jokubas_lape @pablo_fatas where would either of you post your public roadmap if you had a chance? where would it be most beneficial? Especially for the public that likes your idea or other place to post the roadmap?
@jokubas_lape @nicole_ogloza We do not really have a roadmap. We have certain ideas and we are quite vocal about what is coming up next on our community (sigmaos.com/community). We do post all of are release notes on substack (https://sigmaos.substack.com/). We are extremely transparent and answer all user feedback as soon as possible. To me it feels more like we are building the product with our users on the community. They are more invovled then they think they are.
Long story short, we would share our roadmap on a public notion board or on substack but we do not have one so we don’t :)
Aquila
If the roadmap is customer-centric, YES do it. If it is maker-centric, it's really not necessary and would rather arouse competitors more.
@conversionspree makes sense. thanks for sharing! Where would you post a public, less-detailed roadmap to work out in your favor?