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

I love this question. I think the answer depends on the broader business context of your company. Are you working on a product that has strong market share and is extracting value from the market? Or are you at a startup disrupting an existing market? At the latter, I'd expect that there is a lot more appetite, and cultural momentum to define innovation opportunities. Companies always have to balance satisfying existing customers and making new bets to win the market. The business, from the foun ...Read More

To create a winning product, you can’t just build a roadmap based on feature requests in customer feedback. As a product marketer, you need to understand motivations, job to be done, pain points worth solving and unmet needs In my opinion, there’s no difference in the types of roadmap items you can prioritize based on customer feedback and it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Innovation is fundamentally informed by customer feedback. It’s a matter of how deeply you listen to customers, how clo ...Read More

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 understa ...Read More

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 di ...Read More

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 ...Read More