3 Simple Ways To Improve Your Prioritization in SaaS
How to improve prioritization decisions when you’re building SaaS products
At Receptive, we’ve been doing a lot of writing on research on prioritization.
When you’re building a SaaS product, it can be incredibly hard knowing where to spend your time, money and resources.
Just which features & improvements will actually help your customers? How do you stop wasting time churning out features that have no impact on the growth of the business?
Our recent research into how SaaS companies prioritize feedback found that 36% were not happy with their current method, and we uncovered a lot of pain points.
So I thought we’d share our top tips and 3 simple ways you can improve how you prioritize your product roadmap.
You can learn more in our Roadmap Poison: The Wrong Priorities webinar.
Top Tip #1: Get the Right Information in the First Place (and make sure it’s all in one place)
You need to make sure your product feedback channel is capturing the data you need. If you have all product feedback going into a central place, then you can ask the right questions up front.
If you let product feedback & feature requests get spread all over your organization in chat, emails, spreadsheets & the to do lists of your customer-facing teams….you really don’t stand a chance. It becomes a huge and time consuming task to find all the information in the first place and when you do…the context is missing. You don’t easily understand who the request has come from, if it’s still relevant or how important it is.
It sounds obvious but if you aren’t collecting the information that your product managers need, then you really aren’t doing them any favors.
In fact, this is often a major complaint we hear from SaaS product teams — they simply don’t have enough information to aid their decision making. This ultimately leads them to ignore the information that they *do* have and go with whoever is shouting the loudest…or they go with their manager’s gut feeling ;)
So, instead of asking purely for feature requests, ask for the pain point. Focus on the why, not on the what. Then leave it up to your product teams to figure out the appropriate solutions to those problems — empower your product teams to create the solutions that your customers need.
Also remember that the more data you have the better your decisions. Really try to dig into the problem. Ask as many questions as you can. Here are some examples…
- What is the problem?
- What is your current workaround?
- How does it hinder you?
- Who does it impact?
- What could we do to help?
- Which plan are you on? (for most SaaS companies, there’s a massive difference between what smaller customers & larger customers need, as just one example)
It’s as simple as that. Having a single channel for feedback & feature requests means you can ask the right questions and the contextual data is reaching your product team. This is so much better than a list of demands. They can then take that data and use it to create the right solutions.
Top Tip #2: Product Managers Shouldn’t Prioritize Feedback & Feature Requests
If you really want to prioritize your feedback, get your customers and team members to do it for you.
I know that sounds a little crazy but just indulge me, okay?
Prioritizing feedback can take up a lot of time, often many, many hours a week. That’s time that your product managers don’t always have.
This results in one of two things: Either you stop prioritizing, or you stop building your product. It goes without saying that both of those should be avoided.
By allowing your customers and team members to set their own priorities at their own convenience you’re ensuring that you always have the most up-to-date information. As their priorities change over time (and trust me, they will) so will your data.
Now that it’s taken care of, your product managers can make the decisions they need to, they can get out of the weeds and operate on a much more strategic level, confident that they have the information they need. They can segment to see what’s important to each group of users, and then make decisions accordingly.
Read more here: Product Managers Shouldn’t Prioritize Feature Requests
Top Tip #3: Not All Product Feedback is Equal
The uncomfortable truth about feedback & feature request is that they aren’t all equal. While you might aim to treat every user in exactly the same way, sometimes you simply can’t value their opinions equally.
Once you realize this, it opens up a whole new avenue of prioritization. It means that you can focus in on one specific group of customers or users.
Requests for features & product feedback will come in from big customers, small customers, churned users, your sales teams, your c-level folks, free triallers, accounts which have huge expansion potential, those that are going to churn, bad fit users… I could go on, but you get the point.
Before you even start to prioritize you need to understand where all your requests and ideas are coming from in the first place. You can do this by asking the right questions (see the previous tip) or through the use of a dedicated feedback tool. Either way that information is invaluable.
Once you have it, you can delve into the most relevant data, selecting the group of customers/users you are most concerned with. The group you choose will often be determined by your product strategy and will change over time.
Again, collecting all of your product feedback and feature requests in one place allows you to store the data and use it at the appropriate time.
Summary
Hopefully these 3 top tips will help you when it comes to prioritizing your feedback.
Here they are again as a reminder:
1: Product managers shouldn’t prioritize feedback. Allow your customers and team members to do it for you — you can’t guess what everyone wants or how what is important to different groups changes over time.
2: Get the right information in the first place & store it centrally. The more information you have, the better your decision-making will be.
3: Not all product feedback is equal. Make sure you can segment the data when it comes to prioritizing it. Treating feature requests & product feedback as just one fat lump, is not helping anyone. You should rarely build the feature request with the most votes in your forum !
