How to make (and present) a better customer roadmap

Takeaways

• Use the techniques below to visualize your narrative, and find gaps just by looking at it.

• Many companies forget to include an important part of their roadmaps — things they already completed.

• Customers don’t keep up to date with product releases as well as you do. Remind them of recent releases over the past six months

• This also gives you opportunities to show how upcoming work is the latest step in an ongoing effort, versus unfinished + “product gaps” you haven’t started yet.

• This continuity is important for storytelling, and can help frame broader product value vs having to list things you haven’t done yet, and why you aren’t prioritizing one over the other.

Lessons learned from ten years of roadmap presentations

Not all roadmaps are the same. Some organize work, and others communicate vision. This is why presenting your roadmap to customers can be so challenging. For most teams, the internal version of the roadmap is too risky to show to customers without edits. And so making a version for public audiences feels more like censorship instead of storytelling – like the CIA redacting lines in a top secret document.

But you don’t have to present roadmaps this way. Better yet, the roadmap can be a powerful moment to get your customers using existing features and get ready for what’s next. Below, I’ll share a few of the most useful strategies I’ve found in over 10 years of presenting roadmaps to both customers and teammates.

Include features you recently shipped

Most teams jump straight into future plans when presenting roadmaps to customers. But here's a counterintuitive tip: start with what you've already built and rewind a couple months first.

Why look back? Your customers (and some teammates) don't track product updates as closely as you think. Starting with recent launches helps:

1. Ground the conversation in real, concrete value they can access today. Customers take time to adopt new features anyway.

2. Show momentum as you work towards longer term plans

3. Connect today's product to tomorrow's vision

4. Frame upcoming work as natural evolution, instead of a to do list.

If you want a starting point, aim for a third of your roadmap presentation dedicated to “recently shipped” instead of future plans. I’ve found this ratio is a sweet spot which feels future-oriented but still allows flexibility for storytelling. And it is much easier for GTM and product teams to navigate on the fly, especially with unfamiliar audiences.

Building your story arc loop

Once you can talk about features that are already shipped as part of the story, it makes your job much easier. Most of the presentation follows a 2-3 slide story arc, which follows a simple pattern:

1. "This month we introduced..." (Creates momentum)

2. "Which is a step towards..." (Shows intentional progress)

3. "Eventually leading to..." (Builds anticipation)

This narrative loop makes your product roadmap feel less like a wishlist and more like a journey you're already part of.

Visual map: A shortcut to finding your roadmap story

Start with your existing slides. This approach works best if you have a presentation that's grouped by product area, with slides that focus on a single topic at a time.

Without changing the order of the slides, arrange them into each row ("swim lane") by rough time frame of Now / Next / Later. Think: This month / This quarter / This year. It doesn't have to be precise, or include specific dates. The police won't come for you if things are off.

If you have multiple features or product areas covered, treat each one separately — we want to show the relative sequence for each loop. Not all features move at the same pace, and it's OK if timeframes vary between loops.

You now have a visual outline of the "beats" of your story. This exercise quickly reveals:

• Story gaps that need filling

• Natural narrative connections

• Places where you might lose your audience

Each staircase is one of the loops we showed in the last section. A good beat looks like a staircase. Each section may have a different shape, but the entire presentation should resemble a sawtooth pattern.

How to find gaps in the story

Look for places where the outline looks flat. If you have too many of these areas in your presentation, it might be an opportunity to rethink how you want to present your narrative. There are two pitfalls I've found come up more than others — and in the next section we'll walk through how to find and fix them.

Pitfall #1: Skipping the start

A relatable starting point make your story simpler to follow. And the continuity builds a sense of momentum, because there's a direct connection in what's shipping soon and the future — it's episode one, right now.

Pitfall #2: The missing middle

This happens when everything in the roadmap is at polar opposites – it’s either a month away or a year away. The result is big leaps in between short and long term efforts – and that’s where you can lose the thread if a customer doesn’t see the connection.

The mid-term roadmap helps customers see progress on the way to larger initiatives. If there’s something on the long term a customer wants, expect to field questions about prioritization or doing the work faster when the mid-term roadmap is missing.

Wrap up

A great roadmap story isn't just about what's coming – it's about the journey you're already on with your customers. When you connect this progress to future plans, you transform your roadmap from a todo list into a living narrative that will continue to unfold.

Need help messaging your feature releases? We have a guide for that too.