How does your customers' (or the market) willingness to pay influence your product roadmap?

The mistake some Product Marketers make is to only think about net new revenue potential. For example, let’s say you are deciding between two features that will take equal amounts of development time. Do you build the feature that will help you attract new customers or one that will retain your existing ones? If you only considered net new revenue potential, almost everyone would recommend building the feature to attract new customers. This is because the feature that helps with retention won’t ...Read More

This all depends on both your pricing and company strategy, which together determine to what degree revenue opportunity should be weighted when making roadmap decisions. Are you currently focused on optimizing for usage, growth, or revenue? Only you can answer that. In my experience, instead of focusing specifically on revenue, I prefer to prioritize based on "impact" of which revenue is just one measurable component. I could go into more depth on this, but the fine folks over at Intercom have a ...Read More

"Be pragmatic"Yes - sometimes, deals tend to have revenue opportunities linked to them, and the PMM-PM team needs to decide on the trade-offs about making changes to the roadmap that have revenue linked to them. In such situations, it is important to be pragmatic. Some of the questions to think about while considering revenue linked feature development are: Customer and deal pipeline impact - How many opps and current customers will be positively impacted by building the feature now?Timeline - H ...Read More

Many things should play a role in shaping the product roadmap. That might include customer insights, market opportunities, current customer satisfaction, and beyond.  Willingness to pay (WTP) should absolutely be among those considerations. In order to determine how much it should play a role for your particular product, you need to first reflect on what the product strategy is. Are you more of an engagement-based product trying to get customers to interact (e.g., TikTok, Nextdoor, Instagram). I ...Read More

Customer willingness to pay is crucial. You can create a product, but if it's not seen as a must-have for your customer, they won't purchase. Focus on building a product that meets a real need, which is core to a business' toolbox. An easy way of prioritizing new feature development is to ask your customers. We have a customer/user community where we ask them to prioritize certain features and ask them why before we develop them.  If you build a product and your customer doesn't purchase, you kn ...Read More