Publishing external roadmaps can be a controversial topic and there are drawbacks. Who wants to maintain multiple roadmaps? Would this expose the company to criticism when a target date is inevitably missed? Should we worry about competitors knowing our plans? 

These are valid concerns and yet I would still tend to advocate for regularly publishing and updating an external roadmap post-product market fit and sooner than leadership may feel comfortable, at least in the B2B space.

An external facing roadmap demonstrates the company’s commitment to innovation, which can aid in conversations with customers about gaps but probably more so in conversations with prospects. On the B2B side, when a decision maker is evaluating a new, critical tool, they want to see some best-in-class elements in action. But, they also want to feel assured that the tool and that vendor will evolve with their business and continue to enrich the feature set. 

In practice, the external roadmap can be fairly high level, with only brief project descriptions and quarterly or even six month long delivery targets. One way to present it is to list the projects for each of the next two quarters and then group the remaining projects into a second half or six month long bucket since there is likely less certainty the farther out in time given the increasing number of variables. Along those same lines, I probably would not recommend publishing out past a year into the future, as there is a higher likelihood that some of those projects may be scrapped or delayed. 

In terms of competitive positioning, an external roadmap does provide information. However, a competitor that would over index on another company’s roadmap likely is not a long term threat since that would come at the cost of focusing on users.

Publishing an external roadmap has another less obvious benefit: some healthy pressure to live up to the stated timelines. Yes, one could say the company may look bad if it is constantly missing targets. However, as long as those targets have buy-in from key stakeholders within engineering, design, and product, then the external roadmap can also serve to increase urgency and productivity, especially when a milestone appears in jeopardy.