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“What’s the story?”
“You’ve got to tell the narrative!”
“How does it all fit in together?”
As a product manager, I’m sure you’ve heard all this a hundred million times before. One of the key competencies of any product manager or founder is to tell captivating stories that align audiences around their plans and inspire them to believe in their vision. Without a strong product narrative, it’s close to impossible to align with stakeholders and get buy-in for the things you care about.
The most important artifact to accompany any good product story is a roadmap. It helps stakeholders gain context and better understand your long-term product plans, visualize how the features shipped will support your organization’s business goals, and provides enough information to obtain their buy-in.
Of course, you will want to tailor your roadmap to your audience. For more on that, check out our last blog post on what kind of roadmaps are best to share with each audience.
In this article, we’ll outline our team’s principles for presenting roadmaps and how we use the new Loom integration. I’ll share core principles for roadmap storytelling and then look at key roadmap audiences separately. For each audience, we’ll provide an example video from a special guest star and share key principles for presenting to that type of stakeholder.
There are a few guidelines to follow when telling a product story:
First, you should kick off by sharing your company’s vision, which is the reason why everyone is meeting. The company’s vision serves as the foundation for business goals and also the product roadmap. Ideally, we want every new feature or initiative to contribute to that vision.
Once you explain the vision, you should refer back to it as you go through the roadmap so everyone understands the why behind what you’re building and how it helps your company its goals.
As product managers, our goal is to change some part of the world by achieving our objectives. Telling the story of the product roadmap is about clearly defining and communicating these objectives.
When you’re talking about a new product or feature, there are two things you must cover. First, you must provide a brief explanation (ideally one sentence) of what you’re building. Second, you need to say why this new product or feature is important to your customers.
As product managers, we’re used to hearing words and phrases like “OKRs”, “kanban” or “GTM,” but most of our audiences are not product managers and are not used to hearing this jargon.
Finally, it’s important to keep it short and concise and know your audience. Below, we provide examples of great roadmap presentations for specific audiences along with some tips on presenting to them. Our presenters created each of these presentations using Productboard’s new Loom integration. (Learn more about the Loom integration here).
In this video, our Senior Director of Product Management is presenting Productboard’s roadmap to customers, and covers how the company will achieve its goal of moving from the ‘home of product managers’ to the ‘home of product’.
Stephen’s concise presentation clearly articulates some key releases and why it’s important to customers. He makes great use of roadmap features to show high-level timeframes without going into exact dates. He shows progress on the releases and presents mockups, which makes new features much easier for customers to understand.
Next is a video from Justin Reidy, Director of Product Management at Loom. In this video, he provides an update to Loom’s SDK (software development kit) users on what exciting updates will be coming to the SDK over the next few quarters. He clearly explains new features and why they are important — making sure not to use any technical jargon.
