I'm Janna Bastow, co-founder and CEO of ProdPad. AMA!

Hey Jay, nice to connect with a fellow builder :slight_smile:

Your question strikes at the heart of why having a feature-based roadmap isn’t a great idea (okay, there are many reasons, but this is just one!). When your roadmap is a list of features (or worse, features and deadlines, like on a timeline roadmap), it gives the impression that you’re promising a bunch of future improvements, and can cause some customers to hold off on purchasing until something comes to life. As you guessed, it can also affect your pricing experiments. This is why I always recommend to focus on selling what you have today, and using your roadmap as a place to identify the problems you might solve in the future. Your roadmap, then, becomes not a promise of things that will be delivered (which helps no one!), but instead a tool to help you check that you’re looking at the right problems. Test the assumptions on your roadmap just like you would test a prototype for a new feature. You’re not promising that it’ll look like the first prototype, but you’re simply using the prototype to check that you’re on the right track.

Back to your original point, don’t risk muddling up your messaging (and your experiments) by leaning on future features, so keep this level of detail off the roadmap.

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