The Art and Science of a Balanced Roadmap
Integrating Incoming Customer Requests with Long-Term Product Vision
Written by Amy Peltonen
Imagine this: You've meticulously crafted a product roadmap that aligns perfectly with your business goals, vision statement, and product objectives. It's a beautiful piece of strategic planning - a clear path to long-term success. But then, the inevitable happens. High-urgency requests from customers flood in, demanding features that aren’t on your carefully plotted roadmap. If yours is a B2B product, these requests could come from your highest-revenue customers, either directly or through a strategic account manager. If you’re working in a B2C company, you might start seeing a spike in consistent customer support requests or notice a new drop-off in your purchase funnel. You feel good about your roadmap, but you want to keep your customers and other stakeholders happy, too. What do you do?
Balancing these ad hoc requests with your long-term vision is both an art and a science. In this article I’ll share a few things to think about when triaging these requests, and then explore a few options for the best approach to integrating these requests.
The first thing to consider when receiving these requests is: from which type of customer are these requests coming? An essential aspect of your product’s success is making sure you have a focused target market. Especially in the startup phase of a company, it’s tempting to take business from whatever customers will pay you, since cash can be a scarce resource. However, this can lead you down the path of trying to serve customers with very different needs. Going down that path is dangerous, though: it can dilute the business value that you can provide to your customer base, because what you implement for one customer may not be valuable to another. You want to say yes to everyone, but the reality is that resources are scarce and you simply don’t have enough product & engineering resources to serve everyone well all at once. Regularly revisiting and refining your target market can help maintain focus and make it easier to prioritize requests that align with the demands of most of your users vs. a select few. Is your latest high-urgency request coming from a customer that’s in your focused target market? If not, it may be best to focus your efforts on features that are more in line with your long-term product vision and can deliver value to a broader user base.
Another important aspect of triaging feature requests is making sure you understand the underlying need behind the feature requests. Customers often tend to request solutions, but those solutions may or may not actually be the best way to address their needs. To illustrate this point, the following quote is attributed to Henry Ford, the inventor of the first mass-production motor vehicle (the Model T Ford):
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
As we know in hindsight, getting horses to run faster wasn’t the best solution, even though it may have been what users requested. When you get a high-urgency feature request, take the opportunity to dig deeper and look for what actual problem is driving the request. You might find that there’s a feature on your roadmap that addresses the underlying problem in a more effective way. Alternatively, maybe the solution requested by your customer is more elegant at addressing their needs than the feature you have on your roadmap, and you can re-think your roadmap solution.
A final consideration is that product roadmaps are great plans to have in place, but they should be subject to scrutiny and refinement as business conditions or customer needs change. You might find new competitive threats, new technology opportunities, or a shift in customer needs that necessitate a logical adjustment to your original roadmap. Your company or business unit could also go through a strategic shift that changes your business priorities. It’s satisfying to finish your roadmap planning, but as you sit back and admire your work, keep in mind that adaptability is crucial for staying competitive and responsive to emerging trends, ensuring that your product remains relevant.
Even after thinking through those considerations, you might still be flummoxed about how to proceed. Here are some options, along with pros and cons:
Option 1: Defer customer requests until your next annual roadmap planning session. You’ve conducted competitive research, analyzed the market landscape, aligned your product objectives with your business’s overall goals, and used data to develop an objective roadmap that has been agreed to by your major stakeholders. You feel like you truly have the perfect plan in place. Contrary to the popular saying, the customer doesn’t always know best, and so you decide to stick with the roadmap that you’ve so thoughtfully planned.
Pros:
Maintained focus: Deferring ad hoc requests allows you to stay focused on your long-term vision and current roadmap, ensuring that strategic objectives are met without disruptions to your resource planning.
Consistency and quality: A stable development environment enables higher consistency and quality in deliverables, as the team works on well-defined tasks without frequent interruptions.
Cons:
Customer dissatisfaction: Ignoring urgent customer requests can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction. Customers and other stakeholders may perceive your organization as rigid and unresponsive, potentially harming customer relationships and loyalty.
Missed opportunities: Delaying the consideration of new ideas can result in missed opportunities to innovate or quickly address emerging market trends and needs, putting you at a competitive disadvantage.
Option 2: Work in your customers’ requests, even if it means pushing out your other roadmap items. If you’re like me, you love to say, “Yes!” Plus, happy customers typically lead to increased revenues, as evidenced by the research around Net Promotor Score (NPS). And especially that huge customer knows the leverage it has on your bottom line, so you switch gears as needed to accommodate your customers’ needs.
Pros:
Customer satisfaction: Quickly addressing customer needs can lead to increased satisfaction and loyalty. It’ll also get you on the good side of your internal stakeholders.
Competitive edge: Implementing unique features quickly can differentiate your product in the market, especially if your customers leave reviews about your responsiveness or reference your solution to other potential clients.
Cons:
Disruption of long-term goals: Frequent deviations from your roadmap can compromise your strategic objectives. Constant redirection can lead to a fragmented product that lacks a clear, unified purpose, ultimately confusing both your team and your users.
Resource strain: Immediate changes can overburden your development team, leading to burnout or lower quality. Constantly shifting focus to accommodate unplanned requests can disrupt workflows and create a chaotic working environment. This lack of consistency forces your development team to continuously reallocate time and effort, leading to inefficiencies and reduced productivity…and morale.
Option 3 (Recommended!): The Hybrid Model
Mix the art and the science by integrating customer requests with strategic foresight. Here’s how:
Prioritize requests: Evaluate incoming requests based on urgency, scope, and impact on achieving your long-term vision. Do your best to avoid the trap of acting on the demands of the loudest voices. To help with this, I typically use a scoring system to objectively assess the request’s influence on our success factors (which I’ve had agreement on from executive stakeholders via my product vision document). This is a good way to avoid hard personal feelings that stakeholders might experience if their request isn’t at the top of the list.
Create a flexible roadmap: Design your roadmap with flexibility in mind. Allocate “buffer” periods for unexpected yet valuable requests, ensuring they don’t derail your entire plan. Even if you decide not to take on that big hairy feature idea that your customer has, completing a few that are smaller in scope, especially if they’re in the product areas where you’re already doing work, can lead to increased customer satisfaction from customers feeling that their voice is being heard without completely derailing your team.
Communicate with transparency: Keep open lines of communication with your customers and stakeholders. Explain the reasoning behind your decisions and provide realistic timelines. It’s not always easy to explain to a customer that you’re not going to take on their feature request in the near future, but that is a much better approach than saying nothing at all. (It’s a good idea to strategize with your account manager or marketing manager for the best approach on this.) Lack of communication can lead to the customer stewing about their request and wondering why you’re not hearing them or taking their input into consideration.
Conduct regular roadmap reviews: Regularly review and adjust your roadmap – I like to do this quarterly. This iterative approach allows you to incorporate new competitive insights, technological opportunities, and feedback without compromising your strategic objectives.
By adopting a hybrid model, you can strike a balance between immediate customer satisfaction and your long-term product vision. This approach factors in the interest of your customers, stakeholders, and engineering team, while also ensuring that your product evolves strategically and sustainably.
Happy roadmapping!
