As a seasoned product manager, I’ve encountered the intricate challenge of balancing feature development amidst diverse stakeholder demands and limited resources. Through navigating these challenges, I’ve refined my approach to craft roadmaps that resonate with sales, marketing, and development teams.
Central to this approach is the strategic categorization of features into four distinct buckets: Growth Drivers, Customer Feedback, User Experience (UX), and Internal Issues. Through this method, I’ve fostered transparency and accountability within product teams, prompting critical reflection on the rationale behind feature implementation. Join me as I delve into the art of crafting roadmaps that resonate with stakeholders and drive successful product releases.
Avoiding Critical Errors: The Danger of Overlooking Non-Urgent Yet Important Tasks
Managing tasks presents challenges, often exacerbated by stakeholder disagreements. Internal tasks, lacking direct customer requests, are commonly overlooked for their perceived lack of urgency and importance. Conversely, sales-driven requests tend to receive heightened urgency, despite their varying degrees of importance. Bugs, although crucial, often lack advocacy unless prompted by customer complaints or Support License Agreement (SLA) obligations. Neglecting non-urgent yet important tasks can result in critical errors.
In evaluating the significance of internal tasks, the Four Quadrants of Prioritization can be utilized, drawing from the principles outlined in the Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This framework emphasizes prioritizing tasks based on their urgency and importance.
Utilizing the Four Quadrants of Prioritization offers a structured approach to evaluating task significance. By adhering to this prioritization model, organizations can mitigate the risk of overlooking vital issues in favor of addressing seemingly urgent but less critical issues.
Inside the Buckets: Unveiling the Four Key Components of Success
Uncovering True Market Movers for Growth
Growth driver aim to enhance customer acquisition, retention, referrals, revenue, costs, satisfaction, loyalty, and competitive advantage. While only a select few features truly propel market momentum, customer requests received through sales channels are often positioned as such.
Traditionally, growth drivers are identified within a Market Requirement Doc (MRD), which outlines the essential features and functionalities of a product or service based on market needs, customer feedback, and competitive analysis. Serving as a blueprint for product development, the MRD directs the creation of solutions that address market demands and drive business success. Even without formal documentation, allocating additional time to market analysis is crucial in identifying potential growth drivers.
When evaluating requests from sales, it’s important to consider their broader market impact. While a feature may be significant to a single account, it’s essential to assess its potential for broader market appeal.
Furthermore, it’s imperative to assess the impact of new features on existing business dynamics—recognizing that not all growth is beneficial. Will new users complement the existing user base? While increased engagement is desirable, careful planning is essential to ensure that infrastructure, such as servers, can accommodate the additional volume.
Moreover, not all revenue opportunities are advantageous. Even if a customer is willing to pay a Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) fee for a custom feature you need to consider the market value. The NRE development potentially divert existing resources and disrupt current commitments. Before proceeding with NRE calculations, it is crucial to evaluate their impact on the product roadmap and assess any potential effects on competitive standing.
Given that the product’s success hinges on improved metrics, garner support for market-moving initiatives from all stakeholders.
Prioritizing Customer Feedback for Impact
While it may seem straightforward, it’s crucial to heed your customers’ input. Customer Feedback can come in the form of feature requests and bug fixes. While implementing every suggestion may not be feasible, maintaining an open-minded approach is essential. A proficient product manager will know which features the customers are asking for the most.
At a minimum, document a user story for each feature request. I’ve found success by enlisting support to draft the initial user story, refining it as needed thereafter.
For products targeting businesses, incorporating a business case can be advantageous. While user stories focus on the product’s functionality from the user’s perspective, the business case identifies how the feature will benefit the customer / business. Sharing the user and business cases directly with development can also help clarify the request.
Always try to include some obvious customer requested features with each release. Excluding features actively advocated for by customers can be a source of frustration.
Additionally, addressing bugs is imperative. While customers appreciate new features, even minor bugs can be bothersome. While a bug fix may not directly impact sales or help marketing, leaving bugs unresolved can significantly frustrate customers. There is a reason why we call issues “bugs”- they bug people.
Unveiling the Art of Delightful User Experience Design
User Experience (UX) features encompass elements that, while not explicitly requested, evoke delight among customers upon encountering them.
Even with proactive outreach efforts, customers often provide limited insight into their preferences. Quantifying user feedback can be challenging, with the 1% Rule often cited as a reference point for social media engagement. This principle suggests that 90% of users are passive, 9% occasionally engage, and only 1% are heavy contributors. Similarly, online product reviews on platforms like Amazon typically involve around 10% of buyers leaving feedback. Given this scarcity of user feedback, improving UX typically requires progressive action to improve.
A quintessential UX challenge lies in user onboarding, as users who are dissatisfied with a product often refrain from providing feedback. Analytics are pivotal in revealing UX friction by pinpointing bottlenecks, unused features that should be removed, and to identify high use features and workflows that should be refined.
Two important metrics that can help with onboarding is retention and churn rates. The retention rate is the percentage of customers that stay with you. The Churn rate is the percentage of customers that leave within a given amount of time. Analyzing retention rates offers insights into churn rates and highlights the need for potential improvements in user onboarding. Additionally, examining metrics like Daily Active Users (DAU) can provide further context.
A proficient product manager goes beyond merely addressing customer feature requests or bug fixes, often finding innovative solutions in unexpected ways. Whether leveraging focus groups, analytics, or intuition, effective UX solutions integrate feedback from multiple users to craft innovative designs that address customer pain points.
Prioritizing Internal Features for Future Success
Internal issues are often essential but lack direct user demand leading them to be categorized as Not Urgent but important. Consequently, they risk being overlooked amidst more immediate concerns. Some examples of internal issues are: analytics integration, security updates, infrastructure upgrades, database optimization, code refactoring, and technical debtreduction.
An illustrative case highlighting the importance and complexity of prioritizing internal features can be observed in a SaaS enterprise solution that underwent significant growth. By its third year, challenges arose as the original codebase struggled to scale, the framework became outdated, and limitations surfaced within the database schema. Moreover, the absence of built-in load balancing posed immediate concerns, prompting makeshift solutions to alleviate server strain. Database schema issues led to difficulties processing reports, occasionally resulting in system freezes that impacted both the requesting customer and other tenants. To mitigate this, some reports were removed to prevent server overload. Additionally, demands for customer-requested reports, a key feature of the product, proved challenging due to a lack of common keys or suspected computing requirements.
The user interface (UI) presented another significant hurdle, with an outdated framework, numerous limitations, and impending end-of-support for the current version. Despite these challenges, some advocated for delaying addressing the technical debt in order to focus on sales related priorities.
Following a comprehensive assessment of the technical debt, the team opted for a full rewrite, initially estimating a six-month timeline with all available resources. However, this timeframe proved unrealistic due to competitive pressures, sales demands, and as SaaS product there were established SLAs that had to be met. Consequently, the roadmap was divided into two paths: one for ongoing maintenance of the original codebase and another for developing a new solution. Resources were allocated accordingly, with most new features prioritized for the new codebase and non-critical bugs deferred. Ultimately, the anticipated six-month project extended to 18 months to accommodate the complexities and demands of the transition.
The outcome was remarkable, as the new solution entered the beta it played a pivotal role in securing an enterprise account that nearly doubled the user base. The original codebase would have struggled to handle the account, whereas the new solution performed admirably. The enhanced UX from the new framework, and the new features and reports that were not possible with the old solution all contributed to winning the account. The new account became the first account on the new solution. Furthermore, being the first account on the new solution eliminated the need for migration from the old solution, avoiding a complex process that would have caused at least a 24-hour service interruption.
Putting it All Together
For optimal release success, it’s essential to incorporate features from all four buckets: growth drivers, customer features, improved UX, and internal fixes. Growth drivers ensure that the your strategic vision continues to provide the resources to invest in future iterations. Customer features ensure that your customers see that their invested time in your product is rewarded by a company who listens and delivers. Improved UX helps to keep the customer delighted and highlight your ability to keep up with market trends. And the internal fixes prevent bumps in the tracks from derailing your development train.
Conversely, omitting features from any of these buckets indicates exclusion of parts of your organization or customer base, ultimately impacting long-term success.
Consider where you place features on the roadmap. For large projects development is most often broken up into two week sprints with a series of sprints leading to a “Minor” release (1.1) every quarter, and a “Major” (2.0) release every year. In the case of Minor releases you will likely focus more on customer and internal issues, while Major releases will likely contain more growth drivers and UX issues. Alongside the Minor and Major releases you will need to have regular patches that address bugs according to your SLA. It’s worth noting that many enterprises prefer not to introduce new features in patches.
Regardless of release type, prioritize a well-rounded set of features to satisfy both customers and internal stakeholders.