[mfrommil]

"Do you let new customers drive your product roadmap, or just decide your own roadmap and stick with it? Which approach works best in order to gain more product velocity?"

Customers' needs should always drive the product roadmap. That said, it's not uncommon for customers to not know what they really need until it's already been built. This is where the Product Manager comes in to the picture. The PM needs to ensure everything added to the roadmap is of the highest priority and will solve real customer problems or have a positive impact towards the org's key objectives.

A couple tips that may be helpful for you as you navigate this situation:

1. Before any feature-specific debate, you need to be closely aligned on the overall vision and objectives with your key stakeholders, including the "business team". What are your most important objectives to hit this quarter, this year? Growth in active users? Increased transactions? Improved bottom line profitability? etc. Once this is aligned on, it becomes much easier to have these prioritization/tradeoff discussions.

2. Many "business" teams and the leaders of those teams don't understand the basics of software development. Over time, it's beneficial for the PM to help educate key non-technical leaders about the costs of constantly changing direction. Help them understand how technical teams plan and execute, and show the impact to timeline and quality when reckless decision-making gets in the way of the engineers doing their jobs effectively. I like to this of this as a "help them help you" mindset.