The CRO, not product marketing, is closest to the customer and knows what they will buy. The product roadmap should be a collaborative effort driven by the CRO, who can directly tie feature delivery to ICP expansion and revenue forecasts. This creates accountability and predictable growth.

True product intuition isn't just from standard discovery calls. It's forged by directly engaging with customers' most urgent problems on escalation calls. This unfiltered feedback provides conviction and data-backed confidence for decision-making.

In early stages, the key to an effective product roadmap is ruthlessly prioritizing based on the severity of customer pain. A feature is only worth building if it solves an acute, costly problem. If customers aren't in enough pain to spend money and time, the idea is irrelevant for near-term revenue generation.

In the pre-product-market fit stage (the first ~20 deals), the sales leader's primary role is not just closing revenue, but acting as a product manager. They must be in every meeting to gather objections, find pockets of value, and translate raw market feedback into actionable insights for the engineering team.

Founders often create complex plans and documents to avoid the simple, hard, and uncomfortable task of selling. Just as getting stronger requires consistently lifting heavier weights, finding product-market fit requires consistently doing the core work of talking to customers and trying to sell.

Don't view high-pressure sales requests as roadmap disruptions. Instead, see them as opportunities to pull forward planned features, co-design them with a committed customer, and provide the team with a motivating, tangible deadline. This turns external pressure into an accelerator for validated product development.

Your audience will dictate your product roadmap if you listen. Porterfield's evolution was a direct response to customer feedback. They finished her webinar course and asked what to sell. They finished her product course and asked how to market it. The path to her flagship product was paved with their questions.

Instead of relying on investor feedback or intuition, Ladder's product strategy is deeply empirical. The CEO manually copied, pasted, and color-coded thousands of App Store reviews into Word documents to identify core customer pain points, forming the blueprint for their roadmap.

Outbound Sync's founder filters all product decisions through one question: 'Will this help our customer close another deal?' This value-based 'True North' allows him to prioritize ruthlessly, even fixing upstream partners' data issues if it directly impacts his customers' results.