The roadmap debate isn’t going your way.
Your peers want to chase the next wave of growth — new markets, new features, big bets. Meanwhile, you’re staring at the gaps no one wants to talk about: fragile workflows, missing guardrails, the manual overrides that everyone tiptoes around. The skeletons in the backlog don’t scare the team nearly as much as a potential dip in sales.
You want growth too — but something feels off. Prospects hesitate. Sales cycles stretch. Deep down, you suspect what they won’t say: your product doesn’t quite feel ready for prime time.
Now you’re stuck in the middle — trying to balance bold bets with a product that isn’t quite built to hold them.
So how do you keep the momentum going with satisfied customers?
This article offers a lightweight strategy to quietly reinforce your product’s foundation — not with process overload or delay, but with just enough structure to buy time for growth and maturity to move together.
You Don't Need Perfection - Just a Capability Checklist
Remember your deep-down fear that your product isn't quite ready for prime time? A capability checklist lets you put words to your fear. As you grow and add segments, you can use the capability checklist to show how your product evolves as you attack the skeletons in your backlog.
To get started with a capability checklist, you need to coordinate baseline capabilities with the products in your solution. The baseline capabilities are:
Customer experience
Pricing and packaging
Go-to-market materials
Plus, a dashboard of the product offerings in progress. Here is an overview of the capability checklist for a group of product managers:
For more about establishing your baseline product capabilities, please see Product Managers Win Together. The capability model is a checklist for product teams to drive consistency across related products. It is updated as your product offerings change.
Below is an example of the capability checklist for two related products: one is in a data center and the other is in the Cloud.
The product capability checklist shows what is ready today.
Tying Capabilities To a Product Maturity Model
Coordination of product capabilities is crucial for safe growth. Now that you have characterized the capabilities of the products in your solutions, you can see at a glance what each product offering has ready. This helps sales teams in positioning product offerings in appropriate use cases.
A product maturity model shows the different stages of evolution for the product offer. The maturity model goes from scrappy early delivery to a polished, scalable and differentiated offering.
Each stage has dimensions that evolve as the customer use cases grow:
Customer experience: Level of delivery and support repeatability
Pricing / Packaging: Consistent pricing without custom scoping
Go-to-market: Sales enabled to configure and manage solutions at scale
An example maturity model is below:
With the maturity model, sales can position the right offer that fits the customer's solution needs. Early adopter customers are a good fit for less mature product offerings. Customers in regulated industries might prefer more mature product offerings.
Using a Capability Checklist and Maturity Model to Drive Growth Readiness
When your team is chasing growth, it can be hard to make the case for reinforcing the product foundation. But when you combine a capability checklist with a product maturity model, you create a clear, shared language for growth readiness — one that aligns with your go-to-market strategy instead of slowing it down.
Together, these tools help you:
Show what your product can deliver today (capabilities)
Track how your product is adopted and battle-tested (maturity)
This combined view gives your team a way to connect product gaps to growth opportunities — and prioritize maturity work that accelerates sales, rather than feeling like cleanup.
Here's how the capability checklist works with the maturity model:
As you build out new use cases or enter new segments, you can anchor your product work around both what’s capable now and what needs to mature next. If your product is still in scrappy Level 1 territory, customer deployments show you what's next for repeatable Level 2.
Using Capability Checklists and Maturity Models in the Real World
Let’s go back to that roadmap debate.
Your team wants to chase a new growth opportunity — let’s say, enterprise customers. You agree that the potential is huge. But you also know enterprise customers demand more: stronger delivery, tighter processes, and better support. And right now, your product is still in that scrappy, ad hoc Level 1 zone.
This is where the capability checklist and maturity model come into play.
You map your current capabilities: which ones are already in place, and which are missing for enterprise readiness? Then, you layer on the maturity model to highlight the delivery risks and support gaps that would hold you back with enterprise buyers.
Now you’re not just the voice of caution — you’re the voice of alignment.
By flagging what’s essential for enterprise growth, you make a focused case for targeted improvements:
Delivery procedures for onboarding, monitoring, and supporting enterprise customers
An enterprise sales playbook to equip sales with deal strategies, scoping guardrails, and positioning guidance
These items make it into the roadmap — and you’re not just supporting the growth push, you’re helping lead it.
Summary: Make Maturity Work for Growth
When your product isn’t quite ready for scale but the business is pushing for growth, you don’t have to hit the brakes. You also don’t need to fight growth or fix every gap.
This article showed how a capability checklist and lightweight maturity model can give you the shared language to move forward responsibly — without slowing down momentum.
Together, these tools help you:
Spot which growth opportunities are feasible today
Show what’s missing for bigger, riskier segments
Tie product maturity work directly to growth outcomes
You don’t need perfection to grow. You just need to make growth and maturity move together, so your momentum doesn’t collapse under its own weight.
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