At INDUSTRY EUROPE conference (Dublin, April 2019): Especially at enterprise software companies, there are some inherent mis-alignments among internal stakeholders that can complicate our product planning. This talk was an occasionally humorous look at the systemic conflicts between single-account-focused sales teams, market-focused product managers, and executives. How do we respect and understand each other when we may have very different objectives?

1. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
The Organizational
Challenge of Enterprise
Roadmapping
Rich Mironov
INDUSTRY Dublin
16 April 2019

2. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
1. Conflicts about prioritization
are inevitable
2. Algorithms are good, but insufficient
3. Differences driven by incentives,
organizations, sampling bias
Enterprise Roadmapping Patterns

3. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
Development Costs, Customer Revenue
Goal is not to
minimize costs but
to maximize revenue
• Your development team of 6-9 costs…
• Implied revenue commitment…
• Incremental cost per user/unit…
€1M/year
€ 6M/year
< 3%
@RichMironov @ProdCollective

4. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
In the software
business, all of the
profits are in the
nth copy, subscriber,
unit or transaction
@RichMironov @ProdCollective

5. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
• Arrives every day with hundreds of good ideas
• From customers, sales, support, execs, engineers, analysts…
• Universalized from single instances
• “Everyone needs…”
Good Idea Train

6. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
Customer Support/Tech Support Current users with high-irritation bugs
Customer Success/Onboarding New customers with incomplete instructions;
bumpy integrations; wrong problems
Inside Sales/Telesales Very satisfied freemium users; very unsatisfied
freemium users; overly generalized benefits
Enterprise Sales Single customer’s outlier feature; competitor FUD;
“product/engineering can’t hit roadmaps;”
Engineering Technical debt; DevOps infrastructure;
roadmap instability
Executive team Upsell features; innovation; shiny objects
Stakeholder Sampling Bias

7. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
Product Investment Portfolio
visible features:
must do, upsell
-ilities:
scalability, security,
availability, usability…
test automation,
bugs, DevOps
validation, design,
sizing

8. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
• No product is a perfect fit
• Roadmap is starting point
for negotiation
Every Enterprise Customer
Wants Something Special
@RichMironov @ProdCollective

9. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
Hired, trained, rewarded, promoted for
• Persistence, optimism, single account focus
• Persuasive positioning
• Finding champions, escalating
to decision makers
Paid to subvert product plan
B2B/Enterprise Sales Teams
@RichMironov @ProdCollective

10. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
“If Product just understood how important this deal is…
Every customer wants what this customer wants…
How hard could it be? Probably only 10 lines of code…
They need to be more responsive or work harder.”
“If Product just understood how important this deal is…
Every customer wants what my customer wants…
How hard could it be? Probably only 10 lines of code…
Product/Development need to be more responsive.”
Internal Salesmanship
responsive

11. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
Product Investment Portfolio
visible features:
must do, upsell
-ilities:
scalability, security,
availability, usability…
test automation,
bugs, DevOps
validation, design,
sizing

12. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
Theory: One Tiny Deal-Specific Item
this one thing
visible features:
must do, upsell
-ilities:
scalability, security,
availability, usability…
test automation,
bugs, DevOps
validation, design,
sizing

13. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
Real Impact (One Deal)
visible features
-ilities:
scalability, security,
availability, usability…
test automation,
bugs, DevOps
validation
this one thing

14. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
Cumulative Impact
visible features
validation
sales-driven
-ilities:
scalability, security,
availability, usability…
test automation,
bugs, DevOps

15. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
• Very visible scorekeeping
• Explicit “specials” allocation
• Sales VP shares scarcity
No Magic Bullets, But…

16. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
Salespeople do what we pay them to do,
not what we want them to do.
What if we…
• Delayed half of deal commission until
customer achieved real value?
• Comped on software licenses but not
on professional services or “specials”?
• Paid extra for cross-selling during
annual renewal?
Sales Compensation Thought Experiment

17. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
1. Look for patterns
2. Prioritization conflict is about
irreconcilable choices and incentives,
not capacity or inattention
3. Product leaders highlight aggregate
impact of specials, one-offs, interrupts
4. Enlist functional leaders to share
trade-offs (especially Sales)
Enterprise Roadmapping Takeaways

18. @RichMironov @ProdCollective
Rich Mironov
Mironov Consulting
San Francisco, CA
www.mironov.com
+1-650-315-7394
rich@mironov.com
@richmironov