How to stop throwing everything into your product roadmap.
Image credit Flickr: Flickr
How your product roadmap can get out of control
It’s great getting SaaS product advice from your customers, but, much as we love them, they aren’t you. They didn’t build this thing and they don’t know where you are going with it so you smile and nod, and reply “thanks for the feedback, we’ll add it to our plan”.
That’s usually how it goes. But then the fact that you didn’t take their business advice is going to bug them. Why didn’t they listen? What are they doing that’s possibly more important!?
We’ve found this to be especially true for startups. Note for startups: you hear “an awesome place to work, we’re all going to get stinking rich” but in most businesses, startup means, “we’re beginners in business and we’re not very good at it yet”. When you do start to get the hang of this startup stuff, most of you will end up with Customer Success teams (or Account Managers if we’re going to be old skool about it).
For larger SaaS, the danger here is that teams with customer contact are seen to ignore customer feature requests because they often don’t have the weight to get features into the product pipeline.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant
Get customer feature requests into your request management system (even if the feature request seems obscure*) and request feedback from the rest of your customer base and internal teams. Killer features (things solving a real problem for your other users) will be jumped on, voted for and prioritised while un-required features will be ignored.
Once you’ve allowed enough time for feedback, you can respond with a balanced argument - “thanks for the suggestion but there isn’t the demand for this right now so it’s not going into the product backlog”. Sharing a high-level release log and product roadmap with your users can also be beneficial.
Adding transparency and additional voices to the conversation will help the customer see that their request isn’t going to be built but also that there’s a ton of other great stuff you are building. This approach also allows you to manage customer expectations a lot more realistically than the generic almost-auto-reply “we’ve put it on the list” and it fights the “pile everything into Trello and hope for the best” mentality.
It always surprises me how a little transparency and validation (or not) from other users changes the perception of your customers from “you’re not listening or building what I want” to “ wow, you’re really responsive, look at all the ace stuff you’re building”. This happens. Honestly it does!
*Obscure feature requests aren’t always s!@$
Top tip is to keep an open mind…a feature you may think isn’t going anywhere can sometimes surprise you when a load of customers want it too. This is a great opportunity to start a discussion around these types of feature, understand the use cases and see which users of your product are requesting it. Your users will all have a different set of requirements that aren’t immediately obvious to you. Understanding feature requests, their priority and segmenting requests by user-type (big customers vs small, triallers, churned users, users from the different industries you service with your product etc…) are big wins for the development of your SaaS product.
Interesting articles from the tinter webs
7 Reasons Why Your Customers Are NOT Always Right
Your customers are not always right, but they are always the customer
How Baremetrics increased customers loyalty by 126% in 6 hours
