How do you know when you have enough solid information to put forward a product suggestion?

This ties into convincing teams that a feature or change is needed. What level of evidence or research is needed to show that a certain feature or requirement is a "must have" on the product roadmap. "The competitor has it" is not always justifiable evidence.

Answer

4 Answers

Influencing the Product Roadmap

Priya Gill

Iterable Chief Marketing Officer • 5y

You need to prove that there's market demand for it and that the customer is willing to pay for it. Or that it's a major cause of churn which clearly shows monetary impact. That can be validated in a number of ways: analyst validation, customer/prospect validation, willingness to pay research. A good place to start would be talking to Sales. Are we losing deals because we don't have that feature? What was the impact of that loss? What risk does it pose to the business by not building that capabi ...Read More

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Harish Peri

Okta SVP Product Marketing • 3y
1. Focus group or survey data from customers or prospects
2. Market research study showing the need for certain capabilities
3. Survey data from sales, customer success showing the need
4. Deal loss analysis showing that lack of a capability is killing deals
If you have all of these, thats a perfect storm. But even one of these, provided its accurate and unique data can go a long way in convincing PM.
467 Views
Mandy Schafer

Mastercard Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Miro, Dropbox, Demandbase, Autodesk, Oracle, • 3y

It's definitely should never be about just one thing - the customer wants it, our competitor has it, etc. This is a mistake that's often made when product teams build without including PMM, or other teams. There is that requirement to have multiple levels of evidence before a decision is made, however one I think is most overlooked is - ROI, mainly because it takes so much time and effort. I started my career as a financial analyst, and spent my days doing line by line forecasting of our product ...Read More

328 Views
Vishal Naik

Box Head of Product Marketing, AI & Platform | Formerly Google Gemini • 3y

Ultimately I view roadmap as a path to your company's vision to get more customers to use your service. Thus, I definitely dont think that meet-comp features by themselves are justfiable evidence to get something into roadmap--because the market already has that and is it really going to differentiate your product. In certain cases it will help you not lose deals because of a gap, but its not really making you a visionary, so a healthy balance of when to add competitive features is nice. I'd s ...Read More

509 Views