Why we made our product roadmap public

Port's product roadmap has been public since we were six months old. Before we had a sales team or more than one product manager. Our product was bare bones compared to what we have today.

We were a new SaaS company asking engineers to trust us. And we had to earn it.

So we decided to run like an open source company without being one. 

We open sourced our integrations framework (Ocean) so users could extend the product themselves. We put a live demo on the site with no gate because we trusted it to hold up. We built a Slack community instead of controlling the conversation. We launched a free tier so people could try the product without talking to anyone first.

And we put our roadmap on Canny, where anyone can see what we're building, suggest features, upvote what matters to them, and tell us when we're wrong.

We believe that when we build this product, we should build it with the people who use it.

What it does for our customers

Today, our public roadmap has some impressive stats.

1,250+ feature ideas

10,450 votes

1,726 comments

43,200 users

In a given month, we get about 70-90 new feature ideas, 400-500 votes, and 80-100 comments.

Numbers aside, we've found some incredible feature ideas in the roadmap. They're not necessarily ideas we didn't know about, but we didn't realize how much our users wanted them until the upvote count started to rise.

For example, we just shipped our most requested feature "View as". It completely changes the way our customers build in Port by letting builders see Port exactly how their users see it. It had over 150 votes.

Other requests like custom icons (123 votes) and dark mode (73 votes) seemed like small changes but it turned out people really cared about them and were thrilled when they were released.

Some customers even write requests that read like PRDs, with a target persona, the problem, and a proposed solution. The public nature of the roadmap pushes our customers to think a bit harder about how they express what they need, which helps us.

Instead of a request like 'add SCIM,' they explain their access control model and why it matters. That context is important for prioritization.

What it does for us

Publishing our plans creates accountability. When something goes on the roadmap, the timer starts. Our customers, the community, and yes, our competitors, they're all watching. We find that pressure useful.

Since we use Port heavily ourselves, our own engineers often request features right alongside our customers.

It also forced us to get better at communicating timelines. When customers can see everything, you can't be vague about what's next or when it's coming. High votes don't guarantee a feature will ship, but they push us to explain why they won't right now.

The community also surfaces things we may miss. We look at every item, even ones that seem minor. But if a lot of people vote for it, we pay more attention and start asking why. We know community requests can't be the entire roadmap, but they're a significant part of it.

Are we worried about copycats?

If other companies in our space see our plans and ship something similar, that's fine. It moves the whole category forward. Our Director of Product, Dudi, puts it this way: "You can copy features but you can't copy culture."

Because Port is a platform, everything connects. For example, custom widgets are built on top of dashboards, which are built on top of the catalog, which ties into automations, scorecards, and everything else. So our IP isn't a list of features. It's how everything connects and the approach we took to solve the problem. If a competitor finds itself building their roadmap based on what we publish, their whole strategy is reactive.

We believe that when vendors hide the roadmap, the customer pays the price. They negotiate for information instead of building with the product team. We'd rather everyone in this space be more open about what they're building. It's better for the people who use the products.

We'd do it again

People ask us all the time why we opened up the roadmap. By now, it's just how we work. It takes effort to manage and it requires honest communication about priorities. You also have to be willing to be held to what you say you'll build.

But it got us to the product we have today which we're very proud of.

You can see everything we're working on at our public roadmap. Upvote something, suggest a feature, tell us we're wrong. That's what it's there for.