Most product roadmaps have a critical issue: they are only built for the product and engineering organization, and they're not tailored toward non-technical and business audiences. Understandably, that makes executives (particularly CEOs, COOs, CROs, and CFOs) nervous about product roadmaps. Is my company building a financially viable product suite? Will this make money? What do all of these Engineers and Product people (read: the most expensive staff at any tech co) actually do?!

The solution is a financially validated product roadmap. It lays out each feature release with the customer benefit, the TAM of the feature, the revenue pipeline, and the cost (Engineering, Product, and QA time) to build. The goal of this exercise is to enable a cross-functional discussion across the entire company, so that anyone can see not only which features are on schedule — which is the traditional function of the product roadmap — but also the ROI of each feature. When non-technical teams are able to understand the ROI of each feature, everyone wins. Sales teams can sell ahead of it, and company-wide feedback can be captured iteratively.

Bookworm is a seed-stage company, but this is applicable for any size company — whether you’re using an outsourced engineering organization or you're a mature company with a large in-house product team. Either way, you can use a tool like this to see, “What are all these engineers and product folks actually doing?”

The important part is not the spreadsheet format, but the practice of review. This could be reviewed in a 

 or monthly or quarterly. You can even review this with your board. 

A great board member will tell you that their greatest asset is their ability to view strategy. What's more important than showing them the roadmap of exactly what you'll build, with projections grounded in reality? Every team wants to get back to building, and this is a way to do exactly that. 

This version is ordered by delivery date (column C). You could certainly sort it by other values (pipeline size, TAM, etc.) but I’ve found that the best way to have this cross-functional conversation is by focusing on what's most immediate.

As a seed-stage company trying to find product-market fit, Bookworm needed to prioritize these three foundational features. Being able to articulate what is the most important priority to a customer and how this particular solution is going to solve it is critical, and ultimately starts with the founder. This could be years of an earned insight, distilled into a few words. 

There are plenty of ways to forecast TAM: you could use a Statista or Ibis-style market stat, or you could use custom back-of-the-envelope math, etc. But the most important piece is consistency. As long as you are consistent in how you calculate this every time — and you have a shared understanding of that across the company — you can ensure these estimates are trustworthy.

Engineers are expensive. 10x engineers cost 10x more money. Putting on my CEO or CFO hat, if I'm highly concerned about runway, I need to be able to quickly see both when my solution is going to be in the market, and how much that's going to cost.

This information also helps functions like sales and marketing, for instance. If sales understands how long something is going to take to build, they effectively know how much time they have to focus on the sales cycle for the product. Similarly, marketing knows how long it’s going to take to generate demand and acquire leads.

Engineering cost is calculated by a blended hourly rate x number of hours, and it's great to add a bit of padding to those hours so you present a robust estimate. 

This is especially useful in a fundraising scenario. Typically when discussing how proceeds will be used, engineering is presented as a huge cost with no context. Using this format tells investors how long a set of features will take and how much it will cost to build. 

Delays can happen for a variety of reasons — an employee departure, technical complexity, or access to infrastructure (which is particularly painful for a lot of AI companies right now), etc. Suppose I lose a backend engineer to a different company, and I now have to go recruit and onboard a new one. Most companies wouldn't have any visibility or quantification around that cost. However, articulating what an employee departure would do to the customer experience can be very helpful from a directional perspective.

That's part of the magic and secret sauce of this roadmap: your customer needs generally have not shifted, yet you as a company and your ability to execute can shift for a variety of reasons.

Kishan Shah

A financially validated product roadmap lays out each feature release with the customer benefit, TAM, revenue pipeline, and the cost to build — enabling exec and non-technical teams to easily understand the ROI of each feature.

Financially Validated Product Roadmap at Bookworm

Financially Validated Product Roadmap

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