As a product manager, you are responsible for creating and implementing the product strategy. So when it's time to start collecting all the ideas, data, and business intelligence, you'll need to develop the best product you can - a product that successfully meets the strategy you've set for it - you want to be proactive in compiling, analyzing and prioritizing the fire hose of ideas.
If you don't proactively manage priorities, all your work will loop, and you will never achieve what you need to focus on.
Always ask yourself, "Does including this in my roadmap further the strategy of my product?"
So how do you make sense of the prioritize of ideas in the early stages of crafting your product roadmap? One useful way to approach this is to put every new input through a simple test: Ask yourself if implementing the suggestion or feedback will advance your product's strategy.
When it's time to seek ideas proactively and other business intelligence to help you determine what to build into your product roadmap, here are some useful places to start. Of course, you will need to weigh your product decisions based on customer value versus effort.
Customer Feedback
Customers, prospects, customer success teams, sales reps, engineers, marketing teams—everyone may seem to have feedback on the product and the ideas they need.
This will ultimately lead to the details of your roadmap: What the new product (or a new version of the existing product) will include, for whom, why, and how it will advance your company's strategic goals.
You can't afford to prioritize a specific set of feedback just because it appears urgent. (e.g., a sales rep telling you a prospect won't buy unless you build a new feature into the next release). Or because the person requesting it has power (e.g., an executive is asking you to prioritize features that are a pet feature, at best, a nice-to-have).
Prioritization Within The Team
It is possible to apply this feedback within the team by:
- Setting a priority level for each new task
- Tracking them in a live system accessible to everyone
- Breaking larger issues into smaller chunks
- Holding regular meetings to review the situation
- Getting feedback and making adjustments.
Producter is a product management tool designed to become customer-driven.
It helps you collect feedback, manage tasks, sharing product updates, creating product docs, and tracking roadmap.
