There is nothing worse for a product plan than an executive who has just visited a customer.
The visit goes well. The customer describes something they need. The executive wants to add value, so they say yes. Usually it’s a feature. Sometimes it comes with a date.
Nobody meant any harm. The visitor tried to help, and what they actually did was disrupt the process. Product now has two bad options: break the plan to keep the promise, or break the promise to keep the plan. Either way, someone who wasn’t in the room pays for it.
Product people talk about this constantly. Boards, CEOs and sellers rewrite the roadmap, and Product is left defending a plan nobody else feels bound by. The instinct is to push back harder. That is the weakest position you can take.
One CEO I worked with visited a frustrated customer and promised a feature to fix their problem. It wouldn’t have. The feature didn’t address what was actually going wrong, and it would have created new problems nobody intended.
So I helped him write an email to the customer. We were committed to solving the problem, it said, and the experts who define our solutions would meet with their team to find the best way to do it.
We met. What the customer needed was training, not a new feature.
The CEO kept his commitment. We didn’t hijack the roadmap to build the wrong thing. And once the customer was satisfied, the Product leader on my team showed them the roadmap and a few new items we were considering. The customer picked one and became its early adopter. ARR went up. Everybody won.
The email did the work. It turned a promise about a feature into a promise about the problem, and that is a promise you can keep before you know the answer.
Recovering like that works. It is better not to need it. Two things have worked for me: make the process something everyone defers to, including you, and be the product leader Sales wants to call before anyone promises anything.
One answer to every request
Every request I get or hear about gets the same answer:
“We have a business planning process, and even I, as the CPO, won’t skip it. We’re excited to learn more about this request and find out how we can solve this problem for you.”
The customer doesn’t hear a no. They hear interest, from a company that takes its commitments seriously. The executive keeps face. And nobody has promised capacity that doesn’t exist.
The important words are “even I.” A process the CPO can skip is a suggestion. When the person with the most authority over the roadmap says they are bound by it too, it stops being Product’s process and becomes the company’s.
Teach the executives to say it
The answer works better when it isn’t only mine.
I’ve taught CEOs and CROs to say the same thing, with their own title in it. “Even I, as the CEO, won’t skip it.” It works, because the people most likely to make the promise are now the people defending the process.
It also gives them something better to say than yes. Most executives who promise features aren’t trying to run the roadmap. They are in front of a customer who wants something, and yes is the easiest way to be helpful. Give them a line that is just as helpful and commits nothing, and they will use it.
Sponsorship has a price
Some requests deserve to jump the line. An executive who believes in one should be able to sponsor it.
Sponsorship has a price, though. The sponsor has to explain why it matters, how it fits with what we are already building, and what we should delay or cancel to make room for it.
That last question does most of the work. Capacity is fixed. Every new commitment displaces something, and a request fresh from a customer visit always looks more urgent than the work it would push out, because nobody in the room is speaking for that work. Asking the sponsor to name what gets cut puts it back in the room. Sometimes they name it and the trade is worth making. Often the request quietly becomes less urgent.
Be the product leader Sales wants to call
The process holds the line. On its own, it doesn’t win anything. The bigger lever is upstream, before the promise gets made.
I always take calls from sellers. That is my bias, and I think it’s the right one for anyone running Product. Any other bias puts you in a box you probably don’t want to be in: the department that defends everything it won’t do.
Sales respects a product leader who helps them win. So when a seller says the customer asked for feature X, the most useful answer is a question. Can you get me in front of them? Let me learn what they are trying to do.
Customers know their problems. They don’t know the solution.
What a customer asks for is their best guess at a fix, based on what they can see. The product leader can see more: what we have today, what we will have, what we should have, and which of those solves the actual problem. There is often a better answer than the feature they asked for, sometimes one that already exists. And when there isn’t, the product leader knows how to build the business case so the planning process produces the right result.
I’ve used this approach more times than I can count. The seller gets a better answer to take back. The customer gets the problem solved, which is what they wanted in the first place. And Product gets a request with the problem attached, instead of a feature with a deadline.
Wait 48 hours, then call back
One habit makes all of this easier.
When a seller calls right after a customer meeting to ask for something, I don’t act on it. I wait 48 hours or more, then call them back for the details.
Customers know their problems. They don’t know the solution.
The first call carries the excitement of the meeting. The call two days later is about the customer’s problem. By then the seller has had time to think about what the customer actually said, and the conversation starts there instead of with the feature.
The callback matters as much as the wait. I don’t just do what Sales asks for. But I always listen, and they know I’ll call back. We win together, and that’s why they bring me the next one early.
If it still doesn’t work
Use the answer. Teach it to the executives. Put a price on sponsorship. Be the person Sales calls first.
If you do all of that and the roadmap is still rewritten by whoever visited a customer last, you have learned something. You know what the job is, and what it isn’t. If anyone senior enough can skip the process, the CPO isn’t running Product. They are administering it.
That is worth knowing. Better to know than to ignore it, because a product leader who doesn’t own the roadmap can’t be accountable for whether it makes money.