At a growing startup, one of the most essential plans that needs to be drawn out, agreed upon and followed to fruition is the product roadmap. The product engineer’s baby. The developer’s to-do list. Two magic words that can only be disturbed and confused by one thing: customer feature requests.
Often, once the beta version of a product is released, customers start to give more feedback. Someone then starts logging all these feature and UI/UX requests and the product roadmap starts to grow faster than it did before. Ever so rarely, the two are aligned and that works out great for everyone. But sometimes the balance is lost.
When everyone has their own idea of what should be top priority, it ends up being a little like this.
In a startup environment, where multiple project managers are scarce, the head of product or a product roadmap determines what developers are working on. When new features based on customer requests come in to play, they may suddenly become a priority depending on what the customer's value to the organisation is. Product teams end up relying on developers for quick fixes, and developers are left overworked and their efficiency drops.
Where do we go now?
This fine umami balance between product feature priorities, customer requests, developer resources and quick fixes is something that few companies take the time to work out in their growing stages. Neglecting this and continuing based on 'going with the flow' or 'gut feeling' can dangerous for growth. The good news is, there are now tools that can help you do this. We picked out a few so you can decide what works best for you.
With receptive.io, you can list all your planned features into the tool, get feedback from customers on what they want to see in your product or service, create sliders for customers to engagingly prioritise feature plans and keep your entire team informed and involved in the decision making process.
Pricing: The price for receptive starts at $199 for a Standard Plan and goes upto $999 for the enterprise version.
User voice claims on their website 'We think helping you create happy users who love your product is big business" and they have grown with this ideology. Uservoice consists of a product management platform that makes it easy to collect feedback from customers and collate requests that are related to growth. Uservoice also has a helpdesk software for your customer support and ticketing needs.
Pricing: The product management platform starts at a smooth $499 a month for the Basic plan. This plan is targeted at small businesses and is for upto 10,000 valid users.
If your product is still in Beta, you're in luck. You can possibly avoid a bunch of issues by using a tool like Beta Easy that is targeted to reaching customers through the Beta stage alone. This can tell you a whole lot about your audience and their interests. With the product you can host feedback forms, change their themes, auto-suggest feedback topics and a whole lot more.
Pricing: Pricing starts at $19 a month for upto 500 beta users and goes up to $89 a month for upto 5000 users.
Beachhead helps product teams make 'better decisions' by knowing what to build next. The app, which is currently in Alpha testing, promises to make things easier for product and UX teams as well as agile developers
Although the Nudgespot Messenger isn't a traditional feature request tracking and prioritization tool, it is a good place to get a hang of what your users ask for, like and dislike the most about your product. This is because it is a two way chat window that your website visitors and users can type whatever they feel like into. A simple 'search' through conversations for a particular feature and you can see the number of conversations you have had as a team with users around that particular feature.
Have more tools to help develop a product roadmap that you'd like to share? let us know in the comments!
