Strategy & Planning

How to build a product roadmap as Small Marketing Teams

Strategy & PlanningFor Small Marketing Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your three-person team has the roadmap living in five places simultaneously: a Notion doc someone updated in January, a slide deck the VP of Marketing sent to the CEO last quarter, a Slack thread where the head of product gave you feedback on Q2 themes, and two competing spreadsheets neither of you trust. When you need to brief leadership on what marketing is building and why, you spend half a day pulling it together manually — reconciling HubSpot pipeline data against what campaigns are actually in flight, trying to remember which initiatives got deprioritized after the budget cut, and reformatting everything into slides at 10pm. There's no single source of truth. The roadmap is whoever answered last.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Small Marketing Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A living marketing roadmap app that pulls your HubSpot pipeline, campaign calendar, and ad spend into one view — updated automatically, not by you on a Friday afternoon

A weekly leadership briefing that explains roadmap progress in plain language, tied to actual pipeline contribution numbers, not vibes

A shared knowledge base where roadmap decisions, campaign rationale, and stakeholder feedback are searchable so new contractors and the CEO both get the same story

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Knowledge Management Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your HubSpot data on a schedule — contacts, companies, deals, and owners — so the roadmap app has live pipeline context. Connect Google Analytics 4, Meta Ads, Google Ads, and LinkedIn Ads from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when your roadmap app or dashboard runs. Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog to pull in existing campaign briefs and docs. Gmail is synced by Starch on a schedule for stakeholder feedback threads. Browser automation handles any ad platform reporting pages that don't surface cleanly through the catalog.

Prompts to copy

Build me a marketing roadmap tracker that shows our Q3 initiatives organized by theme (demand gen, content, lifecycle, events), each with owner, status, target launch date, and the HubSpot pipeline impact we're forecasting. Pull in our live HubSpot deal data so I can see which initiatives are tied to deals actually moving.

Create a knowledge base section for our marketing roadmap where every initiative has a decision log — why we picked it, what we deprioritized, and what stakeholder feedback shaped it. Auto-flag any initiative that hasn't been updated in 3 weeks.

Build me a 10-slide quarterly marketing roadmap deck for our leadership review: Q2 retrospective with pipeline contribution numbers, Q3 initiative summary with owners and timelines, and a slide on what we're not doing and why.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect HubSpot to Starch (scheduled sync). This gives your roadmap app live deal data — stage, owner, close date, associated campaign — so every initiative on the roadmap is anchored to real pipeline movement, not forecasted fiction.

2 Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can read your existing campaign briefs, Q1/Q2 retrospective docs, and any planning artifacts your team has already written. You don't start from scratch.

3 Connect Gmail (scheduled sync) so Starch can surface stakeholder feedback threads — the email where the CEO said 'double down on enterprise' or where the head of sales pushed back on MQL quality — as context when you're building the roadmap.

4 Connect Google Ads, Meta Ads, and LinkedIn Ads from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries spend and performance live when you need to tie roadmap decisions back to what's actually been working.

5 Open the CRM starter app and describe your custom roadmap view: initiatives by theme, owner, status, forecasted pipeline impact, and associated HubSpot deals. Starch builds the app from that description — you're not configuring fields in a spreadsheet.

6 Tell Starch to build a decision log inside the Knowledge Management app: one page per initiative, capturing the rationale, what was deprioritized, and which stakeholder conversations shaped the call. Set a staleness alert for any page untouched for 3 weeks.

7 Ask Starch to generate your Q3 roadmap briefing doc by pulling the current initiative list, HubSpot pipeline numbers, and ad performance data into a single narrative. Paste it into Slack or email it to leadership — no manual joining required.

8 Use the Presentation Agent (currently in beta — request access) to turn that briefing doc into a leadership deck. Prompt: 'Build a 10-slide Q3 marketing roadmap deck with a Q2 retro, initiative summary, owner/timeline table, and a not-doing-this slide.' Iterate on individual slides without rebuilding the whole thing.

9 Set up a weekly automation: every Monday, Starch pulls updated HubSpot deal movement, checks which roadmap initiatives have new activity, and Slacks you a 5-bullet summary of what moved and what's stalled. You walk into Monday standup already knowing the answer.

10 Publish your roadmap knowledge base section so the contractor writing next week's blog post, the new lifecycle hire, and the CEO all see the same prioritization rationale — not three different versions from three different Slack DMs.

11 When priorities shift (budget cut, new product launch, sales asks for collateral by next week), update the initiative status in the roadmap app and ask Starch to regenerate the briefing summary. Leadership gets a fresh view in minutes, not after your next all-hands.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q3 2026 Marketing Roadmap Review — June prep

Sample numbers from a real run

HubSpot pipeline tied to demand-gen initiatives	1,240,000
Meta Ads spend Q2 (pulled live from integration catalog)	48,000
Google Ads spend Q2 (pulled live from integration catalog)	31,000
LinkedIn Ads spend Q2 (pulled live from integration catalog)	19,000
Pipeline influenced by content initiatives (HubSpot attribution)	380,000

It's June 5th. Leadership review is in four days and you have a Notion doc from April, a Slack thread where the VP of Sales asked for more mid-funnel content, and no idea how Q2 demand-gen spend actually contributed to the $1.24M in open pipeline. You open Starch and ask it to pull your HubSpot deals against the three demand-gen campaigns that ran in Q2, cross-reference the $98K in combined Meta, Google, and LinkedIn spend, and show you which initiatives moved pipeline versus which ones generated MQLs that went nowhere. The app surfaces it in 90 seconds. Content initiatives — two blog series and a webinar — touched $380K of that pipeline. Paid demand gen touched $860K but at 3x the cost per influenced dollar. You ask Starch to turn this into the Q3 roadmap briefing: shift budget weight toward content, deprioritize the LinkedIn campaign that spent $19K for 4 SQLs, and double the webinar cadence. The Knowledge Management app logs the rationale automatically. You prompt the Presentation Agent for a 10-slide deck with those numbers, a Q3 initiative table, and a slide titled 'What we're not doing in Q3 and why.' You send the deck to the CEO on Thursday. No Sunday-night slide wrestling.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Pipeline contribution per marketing initiative (HubSpot deals touched / spend by campaign)

Roadmap initiative on-time delivery rate (launched by target date vs. slipped)

Cost per SQL by channel (Meta, Google, LinkedIn — updated live from integration catalog)

Stakeholder alignment score — measured by how often leadership asks 'where are we on X' vs. finding it in the roadmap app

MQL-to-SQL conversion rate by campaign theme (demand gen vs. content vs. events)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Notion + manual exports

Notion is great for docs but doesn't pull live HubSpot pipeline or ad spend — you still join the data by hand every time you update the roadmap.

ProductBoard or Roadmunk

Purpose-built roadmap tools are designed for product teams, not marketing; they don't connect to HubSpot deals or ad platforms, so the pipeline-contribution layer is still a manual spreadsheet exercise.

Looker Studio or Tableau

You can build the attribution dashboard, but it requires a BI setup you don't have headcount for, and it still doesn't give you the decision-log knowledge base or auto-generated briefing docs.

Monday.com or Asana

Good for task tracking within the marketing team, but they won't surface HubSpot pipeline context alongside roadmap initiatives or write the leadership briefing for you.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, knowledge management, presentation agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We already use Notion for planning docs. Does Starch replace that or work alongside it?

Alongside it. Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog and the agent reads your existing pages when it builds your roadmap app or briefing summary. You don't have to migrate anything. Starch adds the live HubSpot and ad-spend layer that Notion alone can't surface.

We use Customer.io for lifecycle — can Starch pull campaign performance from there into the roadmap?

Yes. Connect Customer.io from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when your roadmap app or reporting automation runs. Same for Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and ActiveCampaign — all reachable from the catalog.

What if we use Amplitude instead of GA4 for analytics?

Connect Amplitude from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live. If your Amplitude workspace requires browser-based access and doesn't have a clean API surface, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API needed.

Is the Presentation Agent available now?

It's currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, Starch can write the roadmap briefing as a structured doc you paste into your existing slide tool — the data-joining and narrative generation work today.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We'd be connecting HubSpot and ad accounts.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If that's a hard requirement for connecting production CRM data, it's worth flagging now. SOC 2 certification is on the roadmap.

We want historical ad spend trends going back 18 months. Can Starch store that?

Starch is built for live and scheduled-sync data surfaces, not long-horizon data warehousing. For Meta, Google, and LinkedIn Ads, the agent queries live from the integration catalog each time your app runs — it doesn't archive a rolling 18-month history internally. If you need that depth, you'd want to export historical data to a warehouse separately and connect Starch on top of it.

Our team is three people — is the roadmap app something only the marketing lead owns, or can the whole team use it?

The whole team. You publish the app, and anyone on your Starch workspace can view it, update initiative statuses, or query it in natural language. The Knowledge Management section is also shared — your contractor can read the brief rationale without DMing you first.