5 ms·
No single customer owns your roadmap, your roadmap is yours. Unless you're actually billing hours to customers for features, the features you add are yours. Se
by buro9 7y ago
No single customer owns your roadmap, your roadmap is yours.
Unless you're actually billing hours to customers for features, the features you add are yours. Sell what you have now, do not sell based on a future promise.
You need to balance the value of a single customer against the opportunity cost of not building a feature that all customers want.
The way I've found to do this: Qualify every feature request. Get in touch with 10 customers and have a list of the outstanding feature requests, and give them a virtual $100 and say, if you can spend this $100 on these n features and you only have $100, how would you spend it? Then take the answers from the 10 customers and see which added to the highest $$$ income. If a single customer is an outlier with all $100 on one feature, establish with their account manager the state of the account, are they happy? At risk? and prioritise accordingly.
Throughout this process, always have your vision hat on. Is the ask for "add this toggle" or is there an underlying common theme that a different approach could satisfy. This is the "most people wouldn't ask for a car, they'd ask for a faster horse" (not said by Ford but always mis-attributed) symptom... you need to see how features align to your vision, and bear in mind that the customers today may not be the ones you need in the future, startups go through wave of customers and you need to be working up that food chain, so what are the right features to satisfy needs, but put you on a path to the customer you want in the future.
Oh, and I'm an engineering manager not PM but had my own startup and had to do this stuff.
- satyrnein 7y agoI personally don't use this approach because I feel like it leads you to a grab bag of features and not a cohesive product. A lot of product management in my experience is laying conceptual groundwork that no client or stakeholder directly asks for. That said, the following article expands on the "Monopoly money" approach, but applied to stakeholders: https://firstround.com/review/This-Product-Prioritization-System-Nabbed-Pandora-More-Than-70-Million-Active-Monthly-Users-with-Just-40-Engineers/ https://firstround.com/review/This-Product-Prioritization-Sy...
- pc86 7y ago> Sell what you have now, do not sell based on a future promise. You've never met a salesperson, have you?
- bmmccarthy 7y agoLove this framing, but the best result of talking to customers about their feature requests is not prioritization, it is understanding what underlying problem those requests were meant to solve. In my experience, feature requests are someone's best guess as to the solution to a problem, but often without the problem statement. When you ask about what problem the request is meant to solve, you come to understand your customers -- even better, you realize there is a much shorter list of important problems than of feature requests. Focus on solving those core problems and most of the feature requests will melt away.