Almost every company claims that they want to be innovative and disruptive. But scratch beneath the surface and the claim usually falls wide of the mark.

Looking at your product roadmap is often a much clearer indication about what your company is about. Deciding what goes on your roadmap requires tough decisions and agonizing trade-offs.

Should you build exciting new product or iterate on your existing product? Should you build features needed by prospective customers or focus on building around existing customer problems? What is on the roadmap, and even more interestingly, why it is there, reveals so much more about the direction your company is heading.

At our recent Inside Intercom event in San Francisco, I discussed some lessons learned from Intercom’s own experience of building a product roadmap. Yours might look slightly different – roadmap formulas change over time, depending on what stage your company is at. But the talk gives an overview of the five key ingredients we use to ensure we have a balanced set of priorities.

If you enjoyed this talk you’d probably love working at Intercom. And good news… we’re hiring product managers!