Why We’re Making our Product Roadmap Public

By Willem Avé, Global Head of Product

We aim to be the most fair, Square, and transparent partner to local businesses. For over 16 years, Square has helped sellers become neighborhood favorites by offering an expansive, connected platform, from POS to payments to business software tools – helping sellers grow and thrive in their communities.

Today, we’re doing something that’s important towards delivering on the transparency and trust we aim for with sellers – we’ve made our product roadmap public.

There’s a few key reasons for this:

First, we want sellers to know what we’re working on. Seller feedback drives our roadmap in the first place, so in the spirit of building together, providing transparency into what we’re building lets sellers know we’re taking action on what they need. It also invites further feedback, so we can all push forward together, faster. A public roadmap enables sellers to plan alongside us – no matter what size a business is, they can see how Square can serve them now, and six months from now. We believe transparency builds trust, and earning and keeping the trust of local businesses around the world is our top priority.

Second, we’ve created a biannual product launch rhythm with Square Releases to give businesses a simple, consistent way to discover what’s new. Meanwhile, our product velocity is accelerating and we’re developing new tools and features faster than ever. The product roadmap completes the puzzle in providing a past-present-future product view to sellers – feature log shares what’s shipped, Square Releases introduces what’s new, and the roadmap previews what’s coming. In fact, we’ll hold our next Square Releases on October 8 in New York, and look forward to sharing more about the latest and greatest with Square’s platform then.

Third, Square is unique in both the breadth and depth we provide. One of the reasons we introduced Square Releases was to make it easier for different business types to understand what Square has built for them – and we’re bringing that same philosophy to the public roadmap. Restaurants, retailers, beauty businesses, and professional services providers can now all go deep into the roadmap to learn how we’re building new vertical-specific features just for them – or learn about horizontal updates, like reliability improvements and financial tools that we’re working on for every seller.

Square’s internal product roadmap has always been a living, breathing, evolving entity – and the same is true for the public roadmap as well. We’ll update it every quarter going forward, and make changes or prioritization shifts based on what we’re hearing sellers need. In the meantime, you can explore the roadmap here.