How To Align Teams During Innovation Roadmapping

Over the years, I've discovered the truth: Game-changing products won't succeed unless they have a unified vision across sales, marketing, and product teams. When these key functions pull in different directions, it's a death knell for go-to-market execution. Without alignment on positioning and buyer messaging, we fail to communicate value and create disjointed experiences. So, how do I foster collaboration across these functions? 1) Set shared goals and incentivize unity towards that North Star metric, be it revenue, activations, or retention. 2) Encourage team members to work closely together, building empathy rather than skepticism of other groups' intentions and contributions. 3) Regularly conduct cross-functional roadmapping sessions to cascade priorities across departments and highlight dependencies. 4) Create an environment where teams can constructively debate assumptions and strategies without politics or blame. 5) Provide clarity for sales on target personas and value propositions to equip them for deal conversations. 6) Involve all functions early in establishing positioning and messaging frameworks. Co-create when possible. By rallying together around customers’ needs, we block and tackle as one team towards product-market fit. The magic truly happens when teams unite towards a shared mission to delight users!

I used to believe Customer Success should drive the product roadmap. Here’s what I know now. The roadmap should be a collaborative design, built by Sales, CS, Support, Product, Marketing, and Leadership together. No one team sees the full picture. ▶️ Marketing sees market shifts. ▶️ Sales hears why deals are lost. ▶️ Leadership ties it all to strategy. ▶️ Product builds scalable solutions. ▶️ Support sees recurring pain points. ▶️ CS sees where customers struggle. When we isolate roadmap ownership, we build for one team. When we collaborate, we build for the entire business. Want true collaboration? Set it up intentionally: 1️⃣ Monthly cross-functional planning meetings: Bring leaders together to align on customer feedback, market signals, and business priorities. 2️⃣ Voice of Customer (VoC) programs: Collect real user feedback consistently — surveys, interviews, success metrics. 3️⃣ Closed-lost analysis with Sales: Review why deals are lost and what patterns could inform the roadmap. 4️⃣ Support ticket and escalation reviews: Identify top friction points that need attention. 5️⃣ Market research and trend studies: Analyze competitor moves and emerging trends quarterly. 6️⃣ Executive alignment sessions: Validate that roadmap priorities map directly to company strategy. The roadmap shouldn’t be a surprise. It should be a shared vision. One that every team feels connected to — and proud of. How does your company approach roadmap collaboration today? Because if you're only building with one team's input, you're only solving one piece of the puzzle. ____________________ 📣 If you liked my post, you’ll love my newsletter. Every week I share learnings, advice and strategies from my experience going from CSM to CCO. Join 12k+ subscribers of The Journey and turn insights into action. Sign up on my profile.

Roadmaps are not one-size-fits-all. They should be tailored to each team. Why? Because roadmaps aren’t just timelines, they’re communication tools. And what you communicate depends on your audience. Consider these examples: - Product Development Teams need detailed, execution-focused roadmaps. Think engineering commitments by quarter, discovery vs. delivery status, and alignment on what’s coming next. - Sales Teams are looking for big-picture stories. They need to know which features will excite customers and when they might expect them. These roadmaps focus on value propositions rather than granular details. - Leadership needs a strategic view. Roadmaps for them focus on initiatives and capacity planning, linking back to the company's broader vision and goals. To create all these roadmap versions effectively, we need collaboration between product operations and product teams. That way, each roadmap serves its specific purpose and audience. Take Rebecca’s example from my Product Operations book with Denise Tilles. By keeping these roadmaps aligned with business rationale, she was able to bridge the gap between sales expectations and product realities, building trust and transparency across the organization. She also introduced a clear framework for sharing feature status across teams. This included stages like Discovery, Alpha, Beta, and GA. Understanding these phases ensures that everyone, from sales to engineering, knows the real status of a product feature and can communicate that clearly to customers. The magic happens when product operations steps up to support these efforts. By providing tools and frameworks, ProductOps help teams to align their roadmaps with strategic intents and prevent the kind of overselling that happens when teams aren’t on the same page. In short, roadmaps aren't just plans, they’re how you build alignment. How are you tailoring roadmaps for different departments in your organization? Let me know in the comments!