Stephanie Leue on Roadmaps, the Hidden Work of Strategy, and the Hardest Part of Product Management

Product State Q&A

Stephanie Leue is the CPO at Ringier Medien Schweiz. She was formerly CPO at Doodle, Head of Product Ops at Eurospace AG, Director of Product & Design at Contentful, Co-Founder at 3Weine, Senior PM at PayPal, and Global Manager of Innovation at Spreadshirt.
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EC: What separates a roadmap that gets buy-in from one that falls flat?

SL: It’s disappointing, but after seeing more roadmaps than I can count across teams and industries, one thing has become painfully obvious:

Most roadmap storytelling falls flat. Not because the plan is missing— But because the narrative is.

After coaching product leaders across continents—and being one myself across industries—I’ve become convinced of one thing:

There isn’t a single right way to tell a roadmap story.

There are at least six.

And each one earns its place at the right moment.

🧭 Vision-first (think: Tesla)

Elon Musk didn’t just pitch electric cars. He laid out a 3-step master plan to transition the world to sustainable energy—starting with a luxury roadster to fund a mass-market future. The roadmap was compelling because it promised more than features—it promised a movement.

🧩 Customer-problem-first (Intercom style)

Intercom’s product team starts every planning session with one question: ‘What problem are we solving?’ Their roadmap isn’t a list of features—it’s a story of real user pain and how they’ll fix it. When used well, this turns strategy reviews into empathy machines.

📊 KPI-led (e.g. Facebook’s ‘7 friends in 10 days’)

In Facebook’s early days, growth wasn’t abstract—it was math. They found one critical metric that predicted retention and built the entire roadmap to drive it. It wasn’t about launching new features, it was about moving numbers that mattered.

📦 Feature/prioritization-first (e.g. early Dropbox)

Dropbox used to crowdsource its roadmap via a public voting system. Popular requests like shared folders or Linux support made it onto the roadmap fast—and users loved the transparency. This approach is clear and efficient—but only works when the audience trusts the prioritization logic.

💼 Sales-aligned (e.g. Salesforce & the ‘Einstein’ pivot)

When large enterprise clients started asking for AI, Salesforce bundled new features into a bold platform play: ‘Einstein.’ It gave the sales team something big to sell—and the roadmap pivot paid off. This works—especially in B2B—when roadmap velocity aligns to revenue urgency.

🏛 Internal pitch-style (e.g. Xbox inside Microsoft)

Xbox wasn’t born from a product plan. It was born from a fear of Sony. Engineers reframed their roadmap as a strategic defence play—to keep Microsoft in the living room. That story won budget, backing, and internal belief. No roadmap spreadsheet would have.

Buy-in doesn’t come from boxes on shiny slides. It comes from urgency.

Make your roadmap the answer to a business problem your clients and stakeholders already feel.

EC: What’s the hidden work behind product strategy that people don’t talk about?

SL: After 17+ years in product, one lesson keeps proving itself:

Clarity scales better than process.

Every successful team I’ve led had one thing in common:

A simple, shared narrative about the problem, the value, and the direction.

That clarity helps execs delegate confidently and enables product teams to execute without second-guessing.

When the narrative is missing, people fill the gaps with good intentions — just not the same ones.

A strong red thread fixes that fast. And sometimes, even in the absence of a company strategy, as a first step alignment on the key user problem is enough.

The easiest part about Product Strategy is creating a strategy. What makes it hard, is the fact that the strategy is never just ‘the strategy.’ There is also:

The work around the strategy

👉 alignment meetings, executive buy-in, stakeholder negotiations

The work before the strategy

👉research, competitive analysis, customer interviews, market sizing

The work to align the strategy

👉presentations, storytelling, decks, influencing, managing politics

THE STRATEGY

👉frameworks, priorities, bets, OKRs, choices

The work to share the strategy

👉clarifying meaning, localization, translating to teams & goals

The work to implement the strategy

👉projects, roadmaps, resources, coordination, tradeoffs

The work beyond the strategy

👉projects, roadmaps, resources, coordination, tradeoffs

The work after the strategy

👉tracking outcomes, adjusting KPIs, feedback loops, retros

EC: Why do even great product strategies fail without people alignment?

SL: No one tells you this before you become a PM:

The hardest part of product management isn’t building features or great products.

It’s the people.

Even if your strategy is clear, your roadmap tidy, and your team works in almost perfect conditions — one thing remains:

You spend most of your time managing expectations, translating between worlds, calming politics.

Stakeholder management isn’t a ‘soft skill.’

It is product work.

Without alignment, even the best strategy will rot.

I’ve seen PMs feel guilty because they’re ‘not building.’

But sometimes, aligning humans is building — it’s creating the conditions for the product to survive, or even better, to thrive.

““Clarity scales better than process. When the narrative is missing, people fill the gaps with good intentions — just not the same ones.”

- Stephanie Leue