"I often feel that the product side of the roadmap gets too much weight, while there should be a healthy balance between the two."
I very much agree with this. The most positive experience I had with this situation was when we were using a system to layer roadmaps into different categories: tech debt, maintenance, growth, regulatory work, etc. We set up a goal at the leadership level of what to focus on depending on the business goal of the period, but teams did not have to abide to that rule or goal by the book, since some teams where naturally more tech related and others where newly set up to address a newly discovered market problem so they were, naturally, more growth focused. The data tracked allowed to understand the tendency and inform future planning cycles.
Thanks to my ex-colleagues at Pipedrive for helping me rescue some of the memories of the above approach.
"I often feel that the product side of the roadmap gets too much weight, while there should be a healthy balance between the two."
I very much agree with this. The most positive experience I had with this situation was when we were using a system to layer roadmaps into different categories: tech debt, maintenance, growth, regulatory work, etc. We set up a goal at the leadership level of what to focus on depending on the business goal of the period, but teams did not have to abide to that rule or goal by the book, since some teams where naturally more tech related and others where newly set up to address a newly discovered market problem so they were, naturally, more growth focused. The data tracked allowed to understand the tendency and inform future planning cycles.
Thanks to my ex-colleagues at Pipedrive for helping me rescue some of the memories of the above approach.