Repositioning a category and rebuilding the roadmap conversation

Situation

A European cybersecurity SaaS vendor operating in the External Attack Surface Management category was struggling to align internal priorities, exec stakeholders and growing customer accounts on a coherent product roadmap. Communication between exec, sales and engineering was inconsistent, customer expectations were not being managed predictably, and the product’s market positioning was diffuse, easily lost in a category that had become crowded with EASM-only competitors.

Intervention

Embedded as a fractional Product Manager. Established a Triage Queue and Delivery Kanban pipeline running an AI-assisted PM process: every inbound request from sales, customers, exec or engineering passed through structured assessment before reaching the roadmap. Authored PRD-shaped artefacts to align engineering on prioritised work and to give exec stakeholders a consistent view of what was being built and why. Drove the repositioning of the product category from EASM to a wider External Exposure Intelligence framing, capturing the supply-chain discovery scope that genuinely distinguished the product from EASM-only competitors. Acted as the translation layer between exec stakeholders and customer accounts, holding the line on product priorities while keeping commercial relationships warm.

Result

A clearer roadmap shared with execs and customers and consistently communicated. Defined product category position differentiating the vendor from EASM-only competitors. Predictable exec and customer communication cadence. Engineering organisation aligned on prioritised work through PRD-driven planning rather than ad-hoc requests. Roadmap negotiation became a process the team could run, rather than a recurring crisis.