Public or private roadmap for your product? 🤔

Question

Hey Product Hunt community!

Having a public roadmap for a product can be beneficial in several ways. It can help to build transparency and trust with customers, as they can see the development progress and priorities of the product. It can also serve as a way to communicate upcoming features and generate excitement about the product. Additionally, having a public roadmap can help to gather feedback and suggestions from users, which can be used to inform future development.

On the other hand, some companies choose to keep their roadmaps private, to protect the company's intellectual property and give them a competitive edge. Additionally, if the company roadmap is not set, public roadmap may cause confusion or false expectations.

Kind of hard to know which one to stick with, isn't it? 
Which one are you using or which one would you recommend?

Accepted Answer

I dont have a SaaS but I think it makes sense to have both a public and a private roadmap. If you are worried about giving away what you are doing to competitors then you can be general and only list the major product updates.

For all the specific things that are truly proprietary to your product and vision, you just do the internal roadmap/project management path.

But letting customers know the major things coming down the pipe makes sense to make them happy and stick with you if you are a new and upcoming company.

Murali Gottumukkala · Answer

Its better to have it public to show the niche

Robin · Answer

Public is a must

Nok Moe · Answer

Public roadmap

Shawn Cao · Answer

Agreed with all the benefits you described to maintain a public roadmap.

Pretty sure most companies keep both - my principle is to keep things in public when it's beneficial to the users - issues tracking, feature requests, big improvements, etc. Unrelevant information should be kept internal so you maintain a clean and simple public interface, again it's beneficial to users as it's not overwhelming/noising them.

Fabian Maume · Answer

For QApop we are using FeedBear to manage the public road map.

Kai · Answer

@shawn_cao Glad to see you commenting as founder of an awesome innovative SaaS (Columns AI).
Right, sometimes less is more. A changelog is also a complementary way of removing what has already done and keep it cleaner :D
What about sensible information about your development? Or you really don't believe there's any? :D

Kai · Answer

@murali_aasaan Agreed, that having a public roadmap is a must for most, but how would you process the sensible information about your development? :D

Kai · Answer

@token_luffy  I also think believe that. Anyway, how would you process what others might think is sensible information about development? Or maybe you are just not worried about that? :D

Kai · Answer

@fabian_maume There are some nice alternatives like Feedbear yeah. Loopedin, Frill.co are nice too. Even Notion would do the trick. Thanks for sharing :D

Kai · Answer

@nok_moe I see this is something most people agree :D
PS: Awesome hook you have there with the "🔥 Sell your SaaS to 145,000+ LTD fans" ;)

Kai · Answer

It makes total sense :D @murali_aasaan

Kai · Answer

Thanks for letting us know your thoughts from the user's perspecitve @macrodave 
Agreed that flexibility is usually the way to go ;)

Public or private roadmap for your product? 🤔

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