Tips to influence the product roadmap with none-to-little budget?

Budget is not the only resource at your disposal; I’d encourage you to get creative and find more avenues to contact prospects, customers, partners, and sales. A simple Google form survey can go a long way. There may be many other low-to-no-cost options for outreach, e.g. your company’s email orchestration system, outreach on LinkedIn, direct outreach through sales reps, analyzing support tickets, running workshops and advisory boards on Zoom meetings. You can also sign up for your competitor’s products, engage with their content and programs, and read customer reviews for your product as well as adjacent/competitive products to get more market context. Once you have built a corpus of research and data-driven hypotheses, synthesize and validate them with your friendly internal stakeholders and categorize them into quick wins vs long-term innovation. Lastly, offer to run cross-functional research insight readout meetings and make sure you have leadership visibility into your efforts.

There is a tremendous amount of research that you can get done with limited budget, it just requires taking initiative, being scrappy and prioritizing what research is going to be the most useful and insightful for your team. Aside from finding the time and prioritizing amongst all the other things on your plate, there are a number of ways you can do robust research to help inform product strategy and roadmap. For example:

• Competitive intelligence and market research, especially for consumer facing companies is little to no cost because most of the information exists on the internet.

• Desk research. If you've ever worked at a large tech company with a seemingly bottomless research archive, digging into existing research is a great way to pull some meaningful insights together quickly without having to spin up an entire months long research track. Even smaller companies with limited research resources have treasure troves of prior research and there is truly no reason to spin your wheels repeating research to get what will likely be similar results (assuming the previous research you're leveraging is recent enough and there haven't been any monumental changes in strategic direction at your company).

• User surveys. If your company has a large enough user base or if you have a small but highly engaged audience, user surveys are a quick and easy way to gather user insights. Even if you can't get a high volume of responses, surveys can still provide directional insights that you can further validate with follow up research, like user interviews or product/prototype testing. I've found that offering a giveaway ("Provide your feedback for a chance to win 1 of 3 $100 gift cards" results in much higher response rates than surveys without incentives. And spending up to a few hundred dollars to get a robust set of data is definitely worth the expense imo, even for a scrappy start-up).

• User interviews. Speaking directly with customers to get richer, more open-ended insights is also a very effective form of research and often provides you with information that may have never crossed your mind. While 1:1 user interviews take more time, I find these more effective than focus groups (especially if conducting these virtually) and I find that you can get enough information from 10 or so interviewees vs surveys where you might want tens to hundreds of responses to feel good about the findings. Pro-tip: sometimes it's hard to get people to agree to interviews when you "cold-call/email" them. I've found that starting with surveys and using them as a prompt to get people to agree to future interviews is a great way to boost your interview response rate. Just include a question at the end that asks them if they'd be willing to share more via a user interview and offer a small incentive ($10-$25 gift card for 30 minutes of their time) when you reach out.

• User data. If your company has a great analyst or user-friendly analytical tools, start digging into customer data. How are users interacting with your products today? Are there trends or insights that can help inform what the product team should test or focus on next?

• Existing research on the internet. Oh the internet! Both a treasure trove of information and a bottomless pit of sometimes unreliable data and unhelpful commentary. Knowing where to look and what to look for will help you turn this vast resource into useful information or at the very least, provide you with some tidbits of information that can supplement the other insights you've gathered and the recommendations you may be making. My strategy when pulling research from other resources on the internet is to go with reputable resources like Forrester or The Aspen Institute. Companies who put out regular reports hyperfocused on specific industries and topics often offer you the information for free if you're willing to give them your name and email. Or if you're lucky enough to work at a company who will pay for a research subscription like eMarketer that is also a great resource.

  Long story short is there are a lot of ways to pull together meaningful insights to help inform the product roadmap, even in the absence of significant resources. It just requires your organization and focus on what answers you're trying to solve, a research plan and then clear learnings and recommendations and most of all, being scrappy!

Interestingly enough, I've started using Perplexity AI with Google Notebook LM to pull together market research for me (for free). Here are some prompts I've been playing around with:

• Start with Perplexity:

  • Use it to scan recent insights from industry news, forums, and reports.

  • Frame the response by asking it specific questions like:

    • "What are the key trends in [your industry] for [current year]?"

    • "What are customers saying about [competitor product/feature]?"

• Iterate Query Focus: Narrow down to actionable areas like feature preferences or regional demand nuances.

• Use Google Notebook LM for Deeper Analysis:

  • Extract insights from unstructured data like research papers, blog posts, or reports.

  • Ask targeted questions:

    • "Summarize customer complaints about [product/industry]."

    • "What features are frequently requested in [product category]?"

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If you want to analyze competitor data to think about more "differentiated" features:

Use Perplexity for Benchmarking:

• Compare competitor roadmaps, product launches, or user feedback.

• Example query: “What are the latest features introduced by [competitor] in [product area]?”

• Dive into Reviews and Sentiment Analysis:

  • Search for user feedback on competitors’ offerings to identify gaps or opportunities.

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• Spot Trends and Gaps:

  • Use Google Notebook LM to summarize findings from multiple sources into categories like customer needs, pain points, or growth opportunities.

  • Example task: Upload datasets or scraped reviews to cluster common themes (e.g., dissatisfaction with speed, desire for integrations).

• Quantify Mentions:

  • Use the tools to gauge the frequency and intensity of discussions around specific topics to support your recommendations.

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Using this info for roadmap influence:

• You can then combine these findings with internal data like feedback from sales or customer success teams, results from surveys or advisory boards, and/or behavioral data from analytics tools to validate your hypotheses. Then structure your recommendation in a way that aligns with the bsiness goals. For example: "Adding [feature] could address [specific pain point] noted in [X% of reviews]."