After aligning everyone on a roadmap, you might think the task is complete. Very often, however, maintaining alignment is the bigger job. Priorities change, urgent issues come up, and difficult decisions must be made that require trade-offs. Coach Melissa Appel will lead a CPO discussion on Managing stakeholders to avoid roadmap derailment.

The reporting org chart isn’t the influence org chart. Whether you are coming into a new company or pondering your current one, thinking about your organization’s decision-making culture will help you understand how many people you need to involve in decisions and how much input is expected.

Asking for feedback from colleagues is a great way to enhance your working relationship. “How do you think that meeting went?” or “How do you think the project is going?” or “Is there anything you think we should be doing differently?”

Product Vision and Themes are the first steps in articulating a powerful, successful roadmap — and yet most roadmaps leave them out, focusing only on features and dates. We’ve developed a roadmap slide format focused on these missing ingredients. Download the free template at my Product Culture Academy.

Great roadmaps show goals, priority and options. They capture direction, discovery and delivery. Yet they stay simple enough for everyone to understand.

Power Players are the people who can make or break your product because they have the authority to insist you make specific changes. They can “swoop and poop” and tell you to completely change your direction at the 11th hour without fully understanding the consequences of their actions.

Many Agile teams have a built-in meeting called a “retrospective” or “retro.” It is a safe space to discuss working together. Effective retros are not about who gets credit or blame, but rather to identify problems and fix them. Often managers will not attend the meeting, to allow the team members to speak more freely.

Back in the day, I developed a fabulous new product for marketers. It elegantly solved a key customer problem. It was easy to buy and use. I was going to single-handedly propel my 50-person startup to stardom and an IPO. What killed my brilliant product? I forgot about the rest of the company. I didn’t have alignment from my stakeholders.t:

I once worked with a team of engineers who took on writing documentation for a full quarter. They had learned that their great product had confusing documentation. The doc team was fully allocated to other things, though. So they switched gears and solved the real customer problem.

Your CTO has a goal to improve uptime. Your sales team has an ambitious quota to meet. Finance is worried about margins. And HR is telling you morale is low. Every exec has a goal and every goal has an exec. Perfect! Or is it?

Smart product people do discovery with customers. Are you also doing discovery with your stakeholders?

The science fiction story I told was of this future world with happy, successful customers became our next big release.

How to deal with fighting between your execs? Carefully. Unlike parents and children, you can’t just tell them to go to their room and take away their TV privileges.

I am a big proponent of the outcome roadmap: one that focuses on the big picture and vision for customers rather than a long list of features that are often changed, plus dates that are often missed. You can read my article on outcomes vs. outputs here.

So you have created the most beautiful roadmap ever. It will drive your company into the stratosphere. It will make your customers cry with happiness. Only thing is: you have to do a presentation about it. Some tips:

Spending is getting more and more scrutiny. As a CPO, how do you justify where you are spending your limited funds?

The past year I’ve been writing a book about stakeholder management with Melissa Appel. What began as an “early reader club,” to bounce writing ideas off smart product people, has turned into... a Stakeholder Support Group? Alignment Anonymous? Product Management Stress Release?

Features can shift greatly from quarter to quarter. A smart roadmap focuses on themes instead. Themes define what’s important to your customers at the present time. They generally remain the same over time. Example:

Many organizations struggle to separate the roadmap from the delivery of features. Often this is accompanied by a lack of vision and strategy. How do you ensure that your roadmap isn’t just a dressed up project plan?

Stakeholders often come to you just as the quarter is starting, or even partway into the quarter, with new requests. “Can’t you just slip this in?”