How do you balance relying on customer feedback to influence the product roadmap vs identifying innovation opportunities?

We’ve typically done this by cataloging every idea and piece of feedback from various sources in a backlog and assigning a weighted score to each for prioritization. The weighting factors can be business impact (new market entry/revenue growth/retention or satisfaction play, etc.), customer impact, alignment with market trends and leadership OKRs, ease and length of implementation, frequency of the request, etc. Doing this exercise collaboratively with your PM counterparts will help you understand the urgency of the requirements and categorize them into short-term enhancements vs long-term strategic innovation opportunities. It would also help to vet this list and your thinking by SMEs in your sales and customer success organizations.

I typically like to think about it in a few phases:

• Phase 1: top customer asks from existing base

• Phase 2: top reasons for customer churn or closed/lost

• Phase 3: top leading indicators for the industry

• Phase 4: experimental where we believe we want to go in 3-5 years

I'll then work with my respective stakeholders to opportunity size each phase by potential ARR and then work with R&D to make calculated investments in prioritizing our existing customers, customers we want to target/win, and directions that will help us break away from the pack as a category-leader. It's a blend of all (4) phases but a fun exercise nonetheless to see what levers are available to you and your teams to best serve your customers.

This is a critical topic and can distinguish between your organization being comparative and innovative. However, there are a few important caveats for both:

• If customer feedback comes from a key customer, consider whether it is a common concern among multiple customers, a logical evolution of your current product, a fit with your target set, and could be a competitive moat.

• For an innovation opportunity, always assess if it fits your customers and company strategy today and where you would like to evolve in the future. If yes, apply the same criteria as in the bullet above. This will help ensure that an innovation opportunity truly moves you forward over being exciting only because it is new and exciting.