Product Marketing Gone Wrong or When Roadmaps Lead to Dead Ends

One of the most frequent questions I hear from both end-users and vendor sales teams is, "what is the latest product roadmap?" Working for a small emerging storage vendor, the answer to that question is often used as a decision criteria by enterprise companies as they evaluate our storage system. For our sales teams, the roadmap becomes a barometer for the future health of the company and impacts our ability to push on despite rejections and disappointments. I am not saying these are correct viewpoints to hold, but are perhaps inevitable given the instabilities of our time and the inherent difficulties in starting a new storage company.

So given the importance of "The Roadmap," how is it actually formulated? For me, it should ideally be a synthesis of input from end-users, Marketing, software and hardware engineers, field techs, and sales teams. No doubt pulling all these ideas together and synthesizing them into a coherent roadmap is no easy matter. However, all too often vendor roadmaps are created by Marketing, executives, and engineering managers, with little or no input from end-users and from the field teams. So then, many times, the decisions about what features should go into the roadmap and what should be dropped or deferred, are made by smart folks, who nevertheless, have little or no recent experience with managing storage in the "real world." Add to that the inevitable development delays, it is no wonder that I find myself often scratching my head as I try to decide how to present a roadmap that was at least 6 months out of date when it was first conceived at HQ and is now more than a year or more behind where we need to be when it is finally presented to the field and to our customers.

When I was at EMC, that wasn't as much of an issue because of our inherent credibility as a major IT vendor and because we were in a position to guide and sometimes even dictate what features end-user should be looking for in the future. And even if some upstart, such as 3PAR, Compellent, or Pillar Data Systems, introduced a new capability that grabs mind share, EMC can simply pronounce that the new technology is immature, produce their own version of the technology, rename it, and then introduce it to the world as a more mature and better engineered product.

That's a luxury that a small company like mine does not have. So companies like mine and others of the same ilk need to make even greater effort to speak with those who are closest to how the technology will be used in the "real world." And it can't be just a marketing stunt; that type of input has to be taken seriously and there has to be mechanisms for evaluating that input and factoring it in when roadmap decisions are made.

For end-user, I have some advice regarding influencing roadmap decisions... Interject yourself into the system, especially if you are already a consumer of a particular vendor's solution; demand input into the roadmap before it is finalized since you are looking into becoming or already are an investor into, not only the vendor's technology, but the company itself. Recognize, especially if the vendor is small, that development resources are limited; this is especially the case when the product is new and the vendor has to allocate already overstretched development resources into fixing bugs. Therefore, make judicious choices about what features to request; choose features that will make the solution better and not just "nice-to-haves" such as a better GUI color scheme. Finally, recognize that how much value is placed by a vendor on end-user roadmap input is directly proportionate to the value of your company's name as a customer "logo"/reference and/or how much future revenue you are likely to generate for the vendor; therefore, if you are not with a "big name" company, you need to frame your feature requests in terms of their impact to future purchases.

In the end, making sure that future solutions are aligned with what will solve real customer problems is the job of both the vendor and the end-user community. I urge everyone to take up the challenge before decisions are made that lead to dead ends.