Roadmap views
Mattermost has three different roadmap views: Public Product Direction, Internal Roadmap, and a Release Plan. Each has a specific target audience and framed in different ways:
Public Product Direction
This view is external-facing, shared publicly with our users, community and customers. This is currently available on our website (https://mattermost.com/direction/).
The primary intent is to share the vision and direction of the product with no committed dates. We use it to highlight the benefits of what we’re building, so it’s easy for people to picture how what we’re building is going to make their Mattermost experience the best it can be. For an example of similar public product direction sites, see https://about.gitlab.com/direction/.
In addition to communicating the direction, we also include features framed in terms of estimated timelines on our productboard portal
3+ Months: This tab includes projects that are in progress now. We’re happy to get on calls to share updates and gather feedback on specs, designs, and prototypes.
6+ Months: This stage covers projects coming up soon, after some of the “Now” work is completed. If an item is in this category, we’re happy to have conversations validating requirements and use cases.
Future Consideration: This stage includes features we’re considering for later. We’re happy to have conceptual conversations on these items, to see which problems resonate the most. We add and remove things from this category as we learn from those conversations.
Internal Roadmap
This view is internal facing, shared cross-functionally across Mattermost staff, to let people see how our product efforts tie back to the higher level company goals and strategy. Items on the roadmap are related back to objectives, and the objectives tie back to our Company Fiscal Year plan, so it’s easy to see how everything fits together.
Key distinction from the Public Product Direction is that this view is framed in terms of business goals (such as increasing NPS, ARR, retention) rather than benefits. Moreover, this view may include business initiatives such as the customer portal, technical, or telemetry efforts that are not outwardly beneficial to our customers.
Release Plan
We also create a release plan based on the internal roadmap. The purpose of the release plan is to enable project management for development teams. All dates in our release plan are target dates not commitments, and items are often moved, added, and removed from the list.
This view is internal facing, month-by-month release plan of new features.
Currently, the Release Plan can be found in productboard, and is updated weekly by the Product Management team.
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