Don't forget your engineering partners when you build your roadmap

Roadmaps are often framed as a product thing where product managers define the priorities, talk to customers, shape features, then hand it off to engineering so they can build what’s on the list. It sounds efficient, but it doesn’t work for long.

If engineering managers aren’t part of shaping the roadmap, it turns into a wishlist instead of a delivery plan, just a list of ideas with no grounding in reality. Sometimes that’s obvious right away, sometimes it takes a sprint or two to realize that what’s on the page and what’s possible don’t match. And in either way, it breaks trust.

A technical lens makes everything sharper

Product brings the customer and business lens, but engineering managers bring the technical one to provide clarity.

That one-line feature? It needs codes that impact four services.
That experiment idea? We can mock it in a day if we skip analytics for now.
That “quick UI tweak”? It’s blocked by three unresolved tech debt tickets.

These are inputs, not complaints, and without that perspective roadmaps fall apart on first contact with reality.

The work you don’t see can slow you down

Here’s the thing: a roadmap full of feature delivery looks exciting, but you need to make space for engineering health, for managing tech debt, or developers experience will degrade and so will their velocity. Engineering managers need to advocate for this kind of work early, before the roadmap is locked. Once features are committed, no one wants to hear about refactoring or reworking a CI pipeline. But if it’s part of the plan from the start, it becomes part of the team’s rhythm and not a distraction from it.

Capacity is not a headcount number

Planning without engineering is often optimistic. It assumes full availability. No onboarding. No burnout. No training. No production incidents. No surprise scope expansions. No engineers vacation. Frankly,I’ve never seen this work! Engineering managers know what’s on the team’s plate. We know who needs mentoring, who has capacity, who has the skills to build that feature, who just finished a high-stress delivery and needs to recover a bit. That context matters, and without it the roadmap is fragile. With it, it becomes** a tool the team can actually deliver against**.

Risk is easier to manage when it’s not ignored

When engineering managers are part of roadmap planning, risks surface earlier. Are we building on top of fragile architecture? Is this third-party dependency still a question mark? Are we making timeline promises without design finalization? These are the kinds of things that can seriously impact delivery timeline and make it derail. Surfacing them early is not about being difficult, it’s about building confidence. A roadmap should be optimistic and it also should be honest.

Engineers do better work when they know the why

Roadmaps built without engineering input is often interpreted as orders. The best engineers I’ve met don’t want to just build, they want to understand what to build and have a word on how to build it.

When EMs are part of roadmap conversations, they carry that context back to the team, they explain the goals, the trade-offs, the things that were left out. Engineers can ask better questions, flag technical risks, and even suggest alternatives the roadmap didn’t include. That’s how you build alignment. That’s how you get engagement instead of quiet compliance.

A roadmap is a partnership, not a handoff

The best roadmap planning IMHO look like a working session between product and engineering. The product manager brings the vision and priorities, and the engineering manager brings the technical reality and delivery lens. Together, we figure out what’s possible, where to push, and what trade-offs to make. When that relationship is strong, the roadmap isn’t just a list of work. It’s a plan the whole team believes in. If engineering wasn’t at the table when your roadmap was built, it’s time to invite them in. Not at the end. At the start.

The engineering manager’s role in roadmap building is NOT about saying yes or no to features. It’s about making sure the roadmap is actually executable, that it respects the team’s capacity, and that it leaves space for the kind of work that product doesn’t always see—like tech debt, tooling, or performance.