Productside Webinar

5 Secrets to Prioritizing Your Product Roadmap

Date:

10/29/2020

Time EST:

1:00 pm
Watch Now

Roadmap prioritization is one of the hardest jobs for a Product Manager. There are multiple approaches to identifying priorities, multiple data sources to consider, many competing voices to listen to, and a large number of stakeholders who must buy-in to your proposed prioritization.

Prioritizing your product roadmap doesn’t have to be a dreaded experience. Once you understand the key principles of the roadmap prioritization process, you can face the task with confidence. By using a well-defined process backed up with market facts and effective prioritization frameworks, and understanding what motivates your key stakeholders, you can reduce the stress and strain of prioritizing your roadmap and winning buy-in from your key stakeholders.

Join this webinar with Tom Evans, Principal Trainer and Consultant from Productside, and Jim Semick, Co-Founder and Chief Strategist at ProductPlan. Tom has helped start-ups through Fortune 500 companies create and launch winning products. Jim’s work on ProductPlan roadmap software has helped thousands of product teams build more effective product roadmaps with less effort. Together, they’ll present a prioritization process, discuss different frameworks to ease your pain on prioritizing your requirements, and provide techniques to win support for your proposal.

Webinar Panelists

Tom Evans

Tom Evans, Senior Principal Consultant at Productside, helps global teams build winning products through proven strategy and practical expertise.

Jim Semick

Entrepreneur and product leader with 20+ years turning ideas into software success. Teaches and advises founders on validation, strategy, and growth.

Webinar Q&A

Product roadmap prioritization is the process product managers use to decide which initiatives, features, and problems to tackle first so they create the most customer and business value with limited time and resources. It’s hard because you’re balancing customer needs, corporate strategy, technical constraints, and a lot of strong opinions from executives, sales, and engineering—all while dealing with uncertainty and shifting markets. The “5 Secrets to Prioritizing Your Product Roadmap” webinar breaks this down into a repeatable process so prioritization becomes more strategic and less political.
Your product roadmap is a strategic, high-level view of where the product is going over the next 6–12+ months; your backlog is a detailed, short-term execution list for upcoming sprints or releases. You prioritize the roadmap based on outcomes, market context, and product strategy (e.g., competitive moves, growth goals), while you prioritize the backlog based on customer value, effort, and dependencies at the sprint level. The webinar explains why roadmaps should not be treated as day-to-day dev plans and shows how to connect roadmap priorities down to backlog items without turning everything into a feature factory.
Popular roadmap prioritization frameworks include weighted scoring models, value vs. effort matrices, RICE scoring (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort), and Kano analysis for customer delight vs. effort. There is no single “best” model; what matters is having a clear, agreed-upon model that reflects your product strategy and is understood by stakeholders. In this webinar, the speakers walk through practical scoring models and complementary tools like Kano and four-quadrant analysis so you can pick a simple, transparent framework that fits your team and gets you out of opinion wars.
To get roadmap buy-in, product managers need to start with the “why,” not the feature list—grounding priorities in customer problems, market trends, and company strategy before showing the roadmap. Then, use an agreed prioritization model, group work into themes or workstreams, and frame decisions in terms of what key stakeholders care about (“What’s in it for sales? For engineering? For the CFO?”). The webinar shares concrete techniques—like using market roadmaps, themes, and shared scoring models—to reduce “hippo” overrides and hallway re-prioritization, and to turn your roadmap into a strategic alignment tool instead of a political battleground.
In agile environments, you should re-prioritize the backlog frequently (every sprint), but re-prioritize the roadmap only when strategy or major assumptions change, not every week. A well-run roadmap typically has clearer priorities for the next 3–6 months and fuzzier, more thematic items beyond that, allowing teams to adapt without constantly resetting direction. This webinar explains how to set realistic horizons, build buffer for uncertainty, and keep your roadmap stable enough for funding and alignment—while still flexible enough to respond to new information, crises, and big opportunities.