When sitting down with stakeholders to discuss your roadmap, treat the meetings like customer interviews. They should be informal, one-on-one. Ask them about themselves. What are their goals? What is keeping them up at night? (And how are the kids?)
Subscribe to my weekly Nano-letter:
Building that rapport will translate into a collaboration. The roadmap becomes not simply an approval process, but a problem-solving exercise that you are working on together. It is not "your" document but "ours." Agreed? What other stakeholder tips are up your sleeve? Tell me a story.