Make a roadmap for your customer
An important part of getting to know your customer is understanding their roadmap and vision for how the Dynamics 365 solution might look in the future. During the implementation process, this understanding is important because it can help you make decisions that are consistent with how the solution will evolve. For example, in a sports management solution, tailoring the Leads table to be a Prospective Athletes table might not be a good idea if the customer decides to also track prospective ticket buyers in the future.
While a solution architect usually pays more attention to roadmap and vision, the reality is that everyone on a project team should have some visibility. Decisions that can affect how well the solution can evolve in the future are made by everyone on a project team that's creating a Dynamics 365 solution.
Listen for clues
As you listen to a customer while they answer your questions, you'll often be able to pick up good roadmap ideas. These ideas can be obvious ones, such as automating lead generation of prospective ticket buyers. Alternatively, the idea could come in the form of an element that they think the in-progress release should include but is clearly out of scope. These ideas are often beneficial for the project team to track and share with others on the team. It's also likely that the sales team might be interested in this information also so that they can pitch an enhancement in the future.
While it might be tempting to encourage exploration of roadmap and vision items, it's more important to stay focused on your current scope. If your discussion with a customer becomes too visionary, bring them back to your current need for details, and then tell them that you'll add these visionary items to their future roadmap.
Avoid over engineering
One risk of a future roadmap and vision is that you can overbuild to prepare for a roadmap vision, and before you get it fully implemented, business conditions change and what you've implemented is no longer viable. In fact, it can become technical debt that you must remove to keep it from distracting users. A good example of this situation is adding tables and columns for future roadmap items. This approach can clutter the solution and those columns might never be needed.
Microsoft's roadmap
While it's important to know your customer's roadmap and vision, you should also follow what Microsoft has planned. Microsoft publishes a roadmap (Product Roadmap | Microsoft Dynamics 365), and then twice a year, publishes release notes with details of upcoming changes for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform components. By keeping current on these changes, you can help identify what might be relevant to your customer's solution. In some cases, you can slightly defer building a custom solution and then wait for the feature on the Microsoft roadmap to be released.
In addition to the roadmap, Microsoft also publishes Important changes (deprecations), which lists current product features that will be retired. When possible, you'll want to avoid using these changes in your customer work. Also, as your team does maintenance on the solution for a customer, you should review and remediate any of the deprecated items.
Proactively helping to develop a customer's roadmap and keeping up to date on Microsoft's roadmap can help you become a more effective Dynamics 365 consultant.