Summary:  To influence the roadmap: join planning early, learn constraints, tie research to PM metrics, and give clear recommendations at the right time. If you've ever spent weeks on a research project only to watch the findings get politely acknowledged and then quietly shelved, you know the feeling. The roadmap gets built, priorities get set, and somehow your work ends up as a footnote. It's not that your PM doesn't care about users. It's that by the time you showed up with something to say, the decisions were already half-made. Over several years of teaching our live course Product and UX: Building Partnerships for Better Outcomes , one of the biggest pain points we hear about is that designers and researchers feel locked out of the planning process. Too many UX teams struggle to get user-centered features onto the roadmap. Getting on the roadmap isn't about finding the magic phrase that makes stakeholders care about UX.…