ould be required to finalize the roadmap. These sessions could provide frames of reference for certain features as well as answer some critical questions from the development organization to help develop a valid roadmap. Engagement of such surrogates could be an ongoing process to ensure vital and valid input is received throughout the product development lifecycle, not just during the roadmap development phase. CHAPTER 4 NETWORK ROADMAPS Customer Support Representatives There is yet another group of stakeholders who constantly interact with customers and who are primed to give further input to the product roadmap. These are the personnel who perform the role of customer support. Such customer support representatives bring valid input to the product roadmap in terms of: Issues faced by customers during different phases of the product deployment: Initial deployment Installation Monitoring and control Support for field issues Critical feature input that could help make successful customer deployments a reality Vital input from competitor products that are deployed to the customers, which could indicate parts where the current product roadmap is found lacking Prioritized history of key "Asks" from the customers that have not been fulfilled, the value of which may be pretty high from the customer's perspective Critical issues logged in the product defect log from the field as reported by customers Customer support representatives bring a further dimension to the product roadmap apart from explicit input received from business and customers. These inputs, when channeled and triaged well, give good indicators as to how the product is performing in the field and what critical aspects of the product roadmap need to be improved to ensure greater success for the product. Ignoring such inputs could mean any of the following impacts to the product and roadmap: Increasing number of issues from deployments Deployments taking longer time periods than planned Increased costs of product development Poor customer satisfaction and 