Product Roadmaps Relaunched

Chapter 8. Achieving Alignment and Buy-in

What you’ll learn in this chapter

What alignment, consensus, and collaboration mean

How shuttle diplomacy can help you obtain input and buy-in

How to use a roadmap co-creation workshop to achieve alignment

“No plan survives contact with the enemy,” said Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. We would add: “or your stakeholders.”

You can create the best plan ever conceived, but it will work only if the people who fund it, execute it, and receive its output believe in it.

I was a product manager at a biotech startup years ago, and we were developing a new product that enabled our customers to extract and work with viral RNA. There was a software component that had to be written, optimized, and tested, as well as a reagent recipe that had to be refined and tested, all before release.

We were a 75-person company in total, so thankfully it was a relatively small team. However, separate teams were developing the software and reagent pieces, and the sales team was constantly begging me for release dates and sometimes directly reaching out to software or R&D. They had sales targets to hit and customers who were asking for the product. I had four other products in development, all utilizing the same finite software, research, and testing teams. My solution for all this? I created an Excel spreadsheet and listed out the products, product features, and release dates, then sent it by attachment to my colleagues.

Problem solved. I was a genius!

Not so fast.

I caused quite ...