In early 2023, we published our product roadmap. Not an internal doc shared under NDA. A public page, updated monthly, with planned features, rough timelines, and priority rankings.
The logic was simple: founders building on our platform deserve to know where the product is heading. They make hiring decisions, architecture decisions, and sales commitments based on what they believe we will ship. Hiding the plan felt paternalistic.
For about three months, the experiment worked beautifully.
Customer conversations changed overnight. Support calls shifted from "Can you do X?" to "I see X is in Q3 — can I beta test it?" Prospects closed faster because they could see the trajectory. Our developer community felt like insiders. A few customers told us they chose us over a competitor specifically because we published our plan.
Trust was measurable. NPS moved. Churn conversations softened. One founder emailed to say, "I've never seen an infrastructure company this honest."
We felt righteous about it.
A roadmap with dates looks like a contract.
We didn't intend it that way. We wrote disclaimers. We labeled everything "estimated." None of that mattered. When a feature slipped from Q2 to Q3, customers who had built sales decks around that feature felt lied to. Not disappointed — lied to. The emotional gap between "they haven't built it yet" and "they told me they would and didn't" is enormous.
Three specific things broke:
Slips turned into trust debt. Every delay required an explanation. Reasonable explanations — we found a reliability problem, we restructured the team, we learned the original design was wrong — sounded like excuses. Customers didn't care why. They cared that the date moved.
Competitors used our roadmap against us. A sales rep at a competing platform started showing our roadmap in demos. "Look, they haven't shipped this yet. We have it today." We were handing ammunition to people who didn't share our commitment to honesty.
The team started optimizing for the roadmap instead of for customers. Engineers felt pressure to hit published dates rather than ship quality work. Product managers avoided adding items unless they were confident they could deliver, which meant the roadmap became conservative and boring — the opposite of what excited customers in the first place.
The moment that forced a rethink was a conversation with a long-time customer who had planned a product launch around a feature we'd listed for Q3. We moved it to Q4. They had already announced their launch date publicly.
We helped them find a workaround. The relationship survived. But the founder said something that stuck: "I'd rather you told me your priorities than your deadlines."
That sentence reframed the whole problem.
We still practice transparency. We just practice a different shape of it.
We share priorities, not timelines. Customers know what we think matters most and why. They know the order. They don't know the week.
We share problems, not solutions. Instead of "we're building feature Y," we say "we're working on the problem of Z." This is more honest anyway. The solution often changes during development. The problem stays true.
We share trade-offs openly. When we decide not to build something a customer wants, we explain the reasoning. Not a corporate non-answer — the actual tension. "We chose to invest in reliability over that feature because three customers had outages last month and that felt more urgent." Founders respect that. They make the same kinds of calls every day.
We share incident retrospectives in detail. When something goes wrong, we publish what happened and what we changed. This builds more trust than any roadmap ever did, because it shows how we behave under pressure.
The old approach — public roadmap with dates — created the appearance of transparency while actually creating a prediction market we couldn't control. Customers traded on our forecasts. When the forecasts were wrong, we paid the cost.
The new approach earns trust through demonstrated judgment, not promised output. A customer who understands our priorities can make their own informed bet about whether our direction serves them. That bet is theirs to own. A customer who sees our incident write-ups knows we don't hide mistakes. That evidence compounds over time.
Transparency isn't about showing everything. It's about showing the things that help the other party make good decisions — and being honest about the things you don't yet know.
If you're considering publishing your roadmap, ask yourself what trust you're actually trying to build. If the answer is "I want customers to believe we're headed somewhere good," share your priorities and your reasoning. If the answer is "I want customers to hold me accountable to dates," you're building a cage.
The founders we admire most are honest about uncertainty. They say "here is what we believe and here is what we don't know yet." That is harder than publishing a Gantt chart. It is also more true.
Radical transparency is a fine instinct. Just make sure you're being transparent about the right things.
Be the first to comment.
0 comments
Loading comments...