The difference between great and mediocre products lies in their focus and impact. Great products prioritize effectively without compromising the larger goal and excel at delivering meaningful results.
That's only possible when you know what's good for business in the long run, starting with rightfully implementing feedback into your product roadmap. But before diving in, let’s start with a quick definition to set the stage.
What is a product roadmap?
A product roadmap is a game plan for your product’s journey from start to finish. It explains how the product will start, achieve, and end when different complications arrive.
It considers why the product feature is important, what problem are customers looking to solve, and how the solution adds value to them. It’ll help you find out if a customer’s solution is the right one.
Assume your customers want multiple payment gateways as a feature to make it convenient for customers. Instead of building a feature, you can add integrations using Stripe and PayPal.
From product teams to design, and developers to sales and marketing, everyone is aligned on the same page. While it is normally created for 3-6 months, it isn’t uncommon for large organizations to create a 12-month plan.
In short, it’s a plan to communicate to your stakeholders and investors about what you plan to build and keep them in the loop.
Things to know before creating a product roadmap
The best product roadmaps fail because of a lack of foresight that goes into defining the following:
a. Why → Vision
The why refers to the vision of the product that’s long-term. It helps understand why the product is built and the problems it will solve for your customers. Finding the mutual fit between stakeholders and the team can help define this without being underconfident.
What kind of feedback to collect:
- Ask your customers what kind of problems they are facing, how does it affect them, what are the alternatives they have tried
- Enquire why the alternatives failed to solve the problem; mostly their limitations
- Ask for their feedback for feature validation—it could be a lack of awareness, a complicated interface due to a steep learning curve, or forces them to change their habit of doing things, and finally no instant value
- Focus on UX problems such as repeated tapping, rage clicks, kickbacks, etc
- Ask for feedback after using a feature via the feedback widget
- Provide screenshots asking them to mark areas of difficulty
b. What → Strategy
The what outlines the strategy that will help attain the product vision. It contains your plan of action that will help achieve your product goals and objectives. This also includes your positioning in the market, value proposition, and competitive edge.
In short, it refers to all the features that could bring immediate value.
What feedback should you collect:
- Ask for feature requests and align them in your product strategy, if it's feasible and viable, go for it
- Run in-app surveys asking customers to understand if this product meets their needs
- Do a 5-second test on your homepage to understand if your messaging is reaching the right people
- Ask your users or visitors regarding their perception of your product compared to your competitors
- Find out how your audience perceives the pricing—is it value for money, underpriced, or overpriced
- Ask them to identify your brand via colors to gauge their brand recall
c. Who → Segmentation
When building your product, there will be all kinds of users—SMEs, enterprises, individuals, and even each with a certain average price value. Each of these groups differs in product usage, and feature adoption rate.
Segmentation when done right will help you the demographics, psychographics, and behavioral attributes of your target market.
What kind of feedback to collect:
- Divide users based on their age, income, sex, and tie to their usage patterns
- Identify the reactivation metrics—which metrics lead them to their aha moment
- Find the Time to First Value(TTFV) for each of the demography and user personas
- Find the DAU and MAU ratio for each different segment and study what makes them inclined to use the product
- Find out the average session duration for different user segments—find the areas where they spend the most time and ones where they don’t
- Track the conversion rate from sign-up to purchase, upgrades, and renewals and identify average revenue from each user cohorts
- Pinpoint the entry points to understand the most effective channels and later segregate them by demographics
- Identify drop-off points to determine why they drop-off
- Study the click patterns to assess how users click throughout the website
d. When → Roadmap
The product roadmap is a visual representation that lays out the timeline for turning the strategy into action. This contains all the features, bug fixes, and other milestones that will be a part of the plan.
This involves a consensus between the customers and all the stakeholders on what can be built based on its real value. This is arrived at by accounting for the cost-to-benefit ratio, scope creep, technical debt, and time taken to deliver within the deadline.
To help you collect customer feedback and turn it into ground reality, we recommend following the Now/Next/Later framework to implement feedback.
i. Now: Address Immediate Feedback
In this phase, collect customer feedback from your CSAT, NPS, support tickets, emails, etc. Work on bug fixes, feature improvements, or small enhancements that don’t require much time.
Prioritize these fixes based on the 60:30:10 proportions where 60% is allotted to bug fixes, 30% to small feature improvements, and 10% to minor UX fixes.
Pro Tip: Work on high-impact bugs that affect a larger number of users
ii. Next: Plan for Upcoming Enhancements
The next phase must include feature requests that aren’t as important as ‘Now’ but can be addressed later. However, here you’ve to prioritize requests that connect to a common theme or naturally align with the greater product features.
For instance, let’s you’re a fintech product that has received a request to plug in more than two bank accounts for national and international payments. If this fits in the grand scheme of things, you can take this up and build it for your current release.
iii. Later: Envision Long-Term Aspirations
In this phase, you can prioritize requests or enhancements that aren’t critical but are still important in the long run. Needless to say, you might need more resources, time, and bandwidth.
This could mainly be from customers who have a high NRR and lifetime value.
As an example, a workflow collaboration tool might receive requests from long-standing clients for a time-tracker feature and an option for semantic search.
e. How → Specifications
Product specifications are a thread that keeps the product teams, customers, and business outcomes on the same page.
Specifications serve as a benchmark for testing which can validate all the intended functions of the product. It helps testers to identify any shortcomings of the features and work on improving them. Finally, well-laid out specifications can make automation testing easier.
What kind of feedback to collect:
- Feature requests and why they need—prioritize on impact, reach, and estimated adoption
- Ask them to rate its usability—ease of use, ability to finish tasks, and its effect on value
- Bug issues they might spotted that might have affected their experience negatively
- Ask them about their experience of using a competitor's product and the scope of improvement
- Focus on contextual usage—ask how customers use your products to bridge the gap between expectations and reality
How to implement feedback into your product roadmap?
1. Brainstorm with teams
Before you decide to implement feedback in your product roadmap, do a brainstorming activity with your customers. Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Get the right team on board—Include members of all the functional teams in your firm who can weigh in their opinions
- Set the tone for the activity—Outline the objectives of the meeting and introduce all team members
- Choose a brainstorming method that works well that works well for your teams
2. Choose the right brainstorming technique
If given a choice, we’d use the SCAMPER method which brings the best ideas out of people
Here’s the breakdown:
i. Substitute: How might we do X instead of Y to reach our goal?
Implementing a live chat feature instead of the ticketing system to improve response times and enhance user satisfaction.
Reasoning—Live chat can provide immediate assistance, reducing the waiting time for users and potentially increasing retention rates.
ii. Combine: What could we put together to make a better experience?
Integrating the analytics dashboard with the user feedback form to provide users with actionable insights based on their feedback.
Reasoning—By combining these features, users can see how their feedback impacts analytics, encouraging a sense of involvement and improving the product based on user-driven data.
ii. Adapt: How can we react to the changing situation on the ground to give more value?
Offering additional integrations with popular remote collaboration tools like Slack or Zoom. To enhance usability and keep up with the evolving work environment.
Reasoning—By adapting to the remote work trend, the product can remain relevant and valuable to users, ensuring continued engagement.
iii. Modify: What part of the flow can we change up to make it an action more intuitive?
Streamlining the onboarding process into a single-page setup wizard to reduce friction during the onboarding process.
Reasoning—A more intuitive setup experience can lead to higher conversion rates and user satisfaction, as users can complete the process quickly and easily.
iv. Put to Another Use: We already have this technology, what else can we do with it to provide more value to users?
Applying the same algorithms to enhance customer segmentation for targeted marketing campaigns. Provides more personalized user experiences and improves marketing effectiveness.
Reasoning—Leveraging existing technology in new ways can maximize ROI and create additional value for users without significant investment.
v. Eliminate: What can we get rid of to make everything feel simple?
Removing redundant settings that users rarely utilize to simplify the user interface and enhance usability.
Reasoning—A cleaner, more straightforward interface can lead to a better user experience, reducing confusion and helping users achieve their goals more efficiently.
vi. Rearrange: What can we change the order to make the experience reflect a user’s mental model?
Allow users to invite team members first, followed by project creation, and then task setup. This will help align the workflow with how users typically collaborate.
Reasoning—By rearranging the steps to match user expectations, the process becomes more intuitive, leading to increased engagement and productivity.
3. Centralize feedback from customers and teams
Use a customer ideation tool to collect feedback from multiple sources like surveys, and customer support tickets. It also keeps track of ideas and requests by themes, product areas, and user segments.
It can also help customers get in touch with functional teams and understand why a feature request can’t be built. This invokes a sense of authority and willingness to listen.
Plus it helps with analytics and reporting allowing product teams to have an overview of the product development process.
4. Prioritize using the DRICE framework
The DRICE framework is an improved version of the RICE model of prioritization.
This framework was conceived while Dropbox was planning to build a migration tool for business users.
Anyway, here’s what the steps include while prioritizing under DRICE:
a. Detailed hypothesis: Explain why building this feature or improvement makes more sense and brings value
b. Impact: Support your hypothesis by narrating the impact on key metrics such as engagement, revenue, and activation
c. Confidence score: Rate its odds of success by rating the confidence level on a scale of 1-5
d. Effort estimate: Outline the development effort required to build. This is best if handled by the tech head
e. Anticipated revenue: Give a projection of the annual revenue impact in dollars
f. Opportunity score: Divide the revenue impact by the engineering estimate
Unlike RICE which takes 30 seconds to estimate, DRICE takes 30 minutes to arrive at an estimate. Instead of using relative scoring, DRICE uses annualized revenue estimates that offer clarity.
To top it off, the degree of effort is evaluated by the readiness in terms of scope rather than merely relying on interest to carry it out.
5. Put DRICE into action
It’s time for the final step. To help you understand, here’s an example of an eCommerce brand wanting to build the “One-Click Reorder” feature
Hypothesis
A sizable percentage of our repeat customers want a faster reorder process. By introducing a "One-Click Reorder" button on the order history page, we believe we can increase repeat purchases by 4%, translating into an incremental $250,000 in revenue per year.
Impact Estimate:
- Impact: 4% increase in repeat purchases, equating to $250,000/year.
Engineering Estimate:
Effort: 5 days
- [1 day] Front-end development to create and position the “One-Click Reorder” button
- [1 day] Back-end adjustments to handle the automated reorder logic
- [1 day] Update confirmation and receipt emails to accommodate new purchase flows
- [1 day] Integration testing for all key flows (reorder, refund, and stock check)
- [1 day] Buffer time for unforeseen issues
Data:
- Strong customer feedback from surveys and support emails indicating demand for a quicker reorder process.
- Analytics show that 20% of existing users reorder within 3 months.
Return on Engineering Investment:
- Annual Revenue Impact: $250,000.
- Engineering Cost: 5 days (~1 week).
- ROI: $250,000 per engineering week.
Outcome
Through this DRICE estimate, we've demonstrated that the "One-Click Reorder" idea has a high ROI and a strong likelihood of success based on customer feedback. This makes it a clear priority for implementation in the upcoming quarter.
Bottomline
By now you must have understood that before implementing feedback into your product roadmap, it's critical to ensure that you get the Why(vision), What(Strategy), Who(Segmentation), and How(Specifications).
That’s what separates great product teams from the mediocre ones. Because the latter does the implementing feedback reasonably well but struggle while centralizing feedback.
If that’s something you find tough, our product folks at Blitzllama can help you. Hop on a demo and we’ll see you there.
More resources on product management
What is product discovery: A comprehensive guide
What is product research: All you need to know
Product market fit framework: How to achieve PMF
