The Sales Roadmap Budget
Give sales a fixed quarterly slice of the roadmap — say 10% of story points — and make them force-rank it.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
The sales-versus-product feature-request war is solved not by saying no, but by giving the VP of Sales an explicit, inviolable budget of engineering capacity each quarter — 10% of the pie, a fixed number of story points — and making them own the prioritisation inside it. Because sales leaders swing with the wind of the current big deal, forcing them to force-rank against a hard budget in a weekly meeting converts thrash into ownership. Stress between product and sales is a sign of health; unbounded stress is what breaks organisations.
Origin
Jason Lemkin, from board and operating experience across B2B companies. He notes that despite talk of shipping 28 times a day, customers can only absorb about two big releases a year, so quarterly budgeting matches how buyers actually think.
Core principles
- 01Customers absorb roughly two big releases a year — plan the roadmap in quarters, not in deploys.
- 02Give sales a budget, not a veto and not a no.
- 03The budget is theirs; nobody can take it (except, grudgingly, the CEO).
- 04Force-ranking on a whiteboard changes what sales says it wants — 100% of the time.
- 05Time horizons differ: CEO looks 5 years out, product 2 years, VP of Sales no more than 12 months. Do not ask sales to look further.
- 06Tension between product and sales is a good sign; no tension means you are not in enough deals.
- 07Individual PMs and reps should escalate, not decide.
How to run it
- 1
Allocate the budget explicitly each quarter
Give the head of sales a fixed slice of engineering capacity — 10% of the pie chart, or a set number of story points. State plainly: this is yours, period, no one can take it from you.
Pro tip Being objective about the allocation is the whole trick. If you are emotional about it, you break the organisation.
Watch out Sales leaders change like the wind — HubSpot integration Monday, SAP Wednesday, Salesforce the following Monday. The budget is what stops that becoming engineering thrash.
- 2
Run a weekly VP-Sales / VP-Product budget meeting
Every week, show sales what is currently being built for them, and what is planned for the next two quarters. Offer them the chance to change what has not yet had code committed.
Pro tip Be explicit about switching costs: 'we haven't committed any code to the next two quarters, so change those freely — but changing what's in flight is hyper-disruptive.'
Watch out Late-quarter changes are the least successful: the budget is already spent and the team is demoralised.
- 3
Force the sales team to whiteboard-rank their asks
The VP of Sales runs a 30-minute weekly session forcing their own team to force-rank feature requests. This is where load-balancing happens — a good VP will trade a HubSpot integration they'd lose one deal on for the SAP integration four prospects asked for.
Pro tip Lemkin: 100% of the time, a whiteboard force-rank produces a different output than the one the team walked in with.
- 4
Mirror it inside the product team
Product spends 15 minutes of its weekly team meeting on the sales budget: here is what sales asked for, is she wrong, how can we make the sales team more successful, and what are we hearing from the field?
Pro tip This is where the magic moment happens — an engineer says 'I built that integration at my last company; I can do it in a day, or outsource it for $20K.'
- 5
Push individual escalations up, not sideways
When an IC rep lobbies a PM in the hallway for a one-feature deal-saver, the correct answer is 'good idea — I'll take it to my boss on Monday.' Encourage the conversation; refuse to let it become the decision.
Pro tip Those hallway conversations are one of the actual reasons to be in an office; they don't happen on Zoom.
Watch out Empower ICs to decide and you turn one stressful VP-level conversation into a hundred stressful IC-level ones, which wrecks the org.
In the wild
Without a budget, even a great VP of Sales insists on Monday that the HubSpot integration is existential — a two-year-out item suddenly reprioritised. By Wednesday a new prospect appears and it's SAP. Two days of speccing are wasted, and the following Monday it's Salesforce.
→ Engineering burns out and nothing ships. Given a fixed budget instead, the same VP load-balances: 'even though we'll lose this deal to HubSpot, I've had four SAP requests — I'll take that bet.'
In a product team's 15-minute weekly sales-budget slot, an engineer hears the HubSpot request and says he built one at his last company — he can do it in a day, or an agency he knows will build it next week for $20K.
→ A request that looked like a quarter-consuming trade-off evaporates. Lemkin calls this the magical moment the parallel meetings exist to produce.
Common mistakes
Saying no to sales instead of budgeting for them
A flat no drives the request underground into hallway lobbying and resentment. A fixed budget forces sales to make trade-offs themselves, and they often discover they don't need the feature after all.
Letting the biggest current deal wag the roadmap
Big stressful deals cause sales to overreact, and they are not product people — they cannot force-rank well without structure. The tail wags the dog and the engineering org burns out.
Treating product-sales tension as a problem to eliminate
Zero tension means your product team is not in enough deals. The goal is bounded tension with enough process that it doesn't break the organisation.
Is it for you?
Best for
Heads of product and VPs of sales at B2B companies where feature-request thrash is burning the engineering team
Not ideal for
Pure self-serve/PLG companies with no meaningful enterprise deal pressure on the roadmap
From the transcript
“every quarter give your head of sales a certain budget whether it's story points or 10% of the pie chart however you do it give…”
“you've got 10% of the budget you've got 100 story points whatever metric or fistic you use but you got to decide now each quarter”
“it's a sign of a well-run B2B company when there is stress between product and sales it's a good sign”
“we owe sales 10% of our points so we're going to put in a weekly in our team meeting”
From the episode
Building a world-class sales org
Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)