When you run a SaaS business, managing feature requests is part of daily life. Managed well, feature request are a valuable source of insight from your customers - helping you to build real value into your product, keep your existing customers happy and grow faster.
Just do what your customers want and you’re onto a winner.
Sounds simple right? It would be nice if that’s all there is to it, but unfortunately life as a product manager within a SaaS business is much more complicated…
- Should you consider every request that comes in from every customer?
- Which customer ideas add real value to your product?
- Should you build features suggested by free triallers? What about churners?
- Will customers churn if we don’t develop the feature they are requesting?
On top of this, you have to work out a system for
- Gathering customer feedback,
- Scoring ideas for value,
- Communicating your decisions on features to your customers
- Telling customers when you make progress
I’ve recently asked a lot of SaaS product managers how they manage all this. They all acknowledge its a tricky problem. The systems being used include:
- Project management tools (Basecamp, Trello)
- Bug trackers (Bugzilla, FogBugz)
- CRMs (Freshdesk, GetSatisfaction, User Voice, Zendesk)
- and of course the dreaded Giant Spreadsheet - sometimes with one sheet per customer.
Lists and spreadsheets are easy to set up but add no value to your data. How come? Go look at some random ideas on your feature idea spreadsheet now and see if you can answer these questions:
- Which ideas are from free triallers that didn’t convert?
- Which ideas are from faithful paying customers?
- Were they on your smallest or biggest plans?
- Is the feature wanted by 10 different users at 10 customer sites, or 10 people at one customer who buys 99 seats?
- How much of a pain point is this for the customer - are they banging their head against this feature-gap all day long (and they are primed to churn) or was it an idea they fired in on a whim 6 months ago and they haven’t spared it a thought ever since?
I’m going to bet that your feature request spreadsheet is adding to the confusion, rather than giving you a clear vision of what features you need to build next.
In a previous SaaS business, we used Trello to store feature requests. Trello is a great tool for quickly building lists, of course, but that might be part of the problem - our idea board soon became too big and unwieldy. This is the problem that Receptive is built to solve.
Receptive is a dashboard for SaaS product teams to collect, measure & understand customer feature requests.
We’re at the start of the journey of buiflding Receptive to solve these problems for SaaS product teams. Get in touch on support@receptive.io or @receptiveio for a demo, we would love to hear from you.
