The public-roadmap debate is usually framed as transparency versus risk. In practice the deciding factor is narrower: can you commit to updating it, and are your customers the kind who will read dates as promises?
What a public roadmap actually buys you
It removes the single most common support question — 'are you building X?' — and it converts. Prospects evaluating you against a competitor treat a live roadmap as proof the product is moving.
It also compounds: each roadmap item is an indexable page that captures search demand for the problem it solves.
What it costs you
A stale public roadmap is worse than none. If the 'In progress' column has not changed in four months, you have published evidence that you are stuck.
Dates are the other trap. Publish quarters or 'Next / Later' buckets, never specific ship dates, unless you are contractually comfortable with them being quoted back to you.
When private is the right call
Choose private when your roadmap is competitively sensitive, when you sell to a small number of large accounts who negotiate on it, or when your release cadence is too volatile to keep columns honest.
Private does not mean invisible. A private board shared with named accounts and design partners captures the same feedback without the public commitment.
The hybrid most teams end up with
One public board for themes and shipped work, one private board for the detailed internal sequencing. Requests flow from public to private; changelog entries flow back out.
The tooling requirement here is board-level visibility control plus unlimited internal collaborators — if internal seats cost extra, teams stop inviting the people who hold the context.