You Are Building the WRONG Things in your SaaS product
Where SaaS companies get prioritization wrong and a new approach to get it right
There are many ways to prioritize what makes it onto your SaaS product roadmap and most of them are incredibly time-consuming and only done by your product teams.
As a result, a lot of product decisions are made on gut feeling, incomplete information, the loudest voice in the room, and the most demanding customers. Items that make it into SaaS products often don’t align with the company’s strategy to support growth or help existing customers reach their desired outcomes.
This represents a huge lost opportunity for your business valuation, shareholders, and customers alike. Just think what could be achieved if time, money, and teams were consistently spent on what really matters.
We’ve recently done a lot of work on this topic including a webinar which you can access here.
Here’s the transcription from the webinar…
This is really summed up in one line — you can’t build everything. You have to decide where you should spend your time and your team’s time to build a product that works for both your customers and your business.
We ran a survey a few weeks ago to try to identify the current issues that SaaS companies face when it comes to prioritizing feedback. We also looked at some other research by Mind the Product and by Richard Banfield.
We all found the same thing — prioritization is a huge challenge. In fact, 36% of SaaS companies aren’t happy with how they currently prioritize according to our research.
It even comes out on top when ranked by relative importance. That’s why we think it’s important to help as many of you as possible.
There are a lot of blog posts and websites that talk about a range of different techniques you can use to prioritize, but they miss the bigger picture.
If you want to prioritize successfully you can’t view it in isolation or treat it as a product management task. It isn’t just a case of shuffling features around and looking busy. So we’ve come up with an easy way of remembering what you need to think about.
We’ve handily called it the “The 3 Ps of Prioritization”
It involves a little bit of groundwork that will set you up for life.
Number 1 — PLAN Every prioritization decision you make has to be in line with your company plan or strategy. If you haven’t got one, get one. If it’s unclear, make it clear. And don’t forget to slap a copy where everyone can see it!
Number 2 — PEOPLE Prioritization as a process is actually all about people and it’s really helpful for product teams to accept and embrace that. It’s definitely more about politics than features.
Number 3 — PROCESS. A good process removes a lot of people management issues and keeps everyone aligned and onboard with what you are trying to achieve as a product team, from your execs to your customers.
Let’s take a look at each in more detail…
The First “P” of Prioritization: It’s All in the PLAN
Many people have a product strategy but everything needs to tie back to the company plan as well.
This is the stuff you don’t get told or taught, but it’s what will make you really stand out in your organization as a product manager.
Everything you choose to improve or build in your SaaS product should support the business. It’s as simple as that.
If you don’t have a plan in place, you have no chance when it comes to prioritization. Your plan is your framework for every decision to ensure that you are walking along the right path.
The Second “P” of Prioritization: PEOPLE = Politics
At the risk of sounding like a politician, prioritization should be about the people, not just the product.
There’s a great quote from Richard Banfield’s research into the same area. He encourages Product teams to think about “Collaboration, not consensus”
He says:
“Prioritization can be polarizing because it’s often perceived as choosing one person’s ideas over another’s. When people have something personal invested in an idea or feature that’s on the chopping block, emotions can run high. The solution is collaborating at several levels and it starts with developing a shared vision and purpose for the product.
Getting buy in to the company vision and the ‘why’ driving that vision are essential. Agreement and understanding of both the company and product vision give the team a North Star. The key to breaking the potential stalemate is to not set consensus as the goal. Collaborating towards a solution doesn’t require consensus. This concept is not new to leaders but might be new to the realm product leadership.”
The Third “P” of Prioritization: A Practical PROCESS
Let’s look at some ways in which you can involve people with prioritization in a really positive way. This is where a little bit of process is key.
Mind The Product found these were the areas that product leaders wanted to improve most when it came to help with prioritization — no surprises there at all!
We’ve been working with scaling & Enterprise SaaS companies for a few years now and when it comes to product feedback and prioritization, process & data are absolutely key.
Here are our top learnings about what works.
Tip #1: Centralize your Product Feedback
Tip #2: Good Prioritization Starts with Good Data
If you are working with stale or out of date information, you won’t stand a chance.
If you have a forum full of votes for feature requests, ideas in emails, things floating about in your chat widget, and customers talking to support and customer success teams, then I guarantee you won’t be making prioritization decisions well at all.
It’s not your fault, you simply can’t do it with your data spread around like that!
Get all your data in one place. We have a webinar about this already.
If you’re small, make sure it’s all going into a spreadsheet, Trello, or Airtable. If you’re scaling or Enterprise that’s where Receptive comes in.
You need to create a “go-to” place for product feedback then you can take that data into your prioritization meetings.
As a product team, you’ll always be dealing with information that is out of context. I’m sure you’ve all experienced times where you receive a request and you have no idea what it means. You lack the context.
Here’s one of our feedback forms we use with our customers and internal teams.
Asking questions beyond “What is your feature request?” allows the product teams to understand pain points, spot themes, and work with uniform information.
Getting the right data to the product teams in the first place is not only a huge time saver but it also means your organization is making decisions based on good data.
You need to make sure you create a centralized place for feedback and that everyone knows what sort of data you need. As part of this, you should always capture WHO the product feedback, idea, or insight has come from!
All of this empowers product teams to design good solutions. It stops them from simply reacting to a mountain of disorganized product feedback and feature requests.
Tip #3: Don’t Prioritize for Others
You also need to stop prioritizing for other people.
Here’s why…
You aren’t every stakeholder… You can try to understand other people’s point of view but ultimately you aren’t that person. You can’t predict how or why people will change their priorities over time.
Instead, look at what the data is trying to tell you. You can’t argue with facts and figures.
Prioritization is done by a few and not the majority… Often when you build a SaaS product there are a lot of stakeholders who all have different demands. For example, you’ll have a mix of customers from small to large, free triallers, different industries, and various locations. All these factors will influence their priorities.
Then you have different teams. Support will want the little niggling features and fixes taken care of. Sales will want the product built in a way to help them close deals. Leadership want the company to grow. It’s impossible for product managers to balance all of these demands.
Instead, try to prioritize strategically, based on your plan and strategy.
Priorities change… Actually, they change a lot. As customers get to grips with your product their wants and needs will change.
For example, early requests from new users may result from a lack of understanding of existing features. Once they work those features out their priorities will change.
So always make sure you’re working with relevant information.
Tip #4: Close the Feedback Loop
One of the best things you can do when it comes to prioritization is keep others in the loop — both your customers and your internal teams.
Doing things like sharing a high-level roadmap, sending updates as items on your roadmap change status, and sharing a release log create an awful lot of buy-in from everyone around you.
All our customers and teams that are following a request can look up the status at any time and updates are sent when a change is made.
This helps keep everyone aligned and excited about where your product is going too.
Instead of just collecting feedback, give everyone something back in return. It removes any shoulder tapping and others are much more willing to give you good information.
Tip #5: Prioritization is an Ongoing Process
You need to accept that prioritization is an ongoing process. As we’ve already covered, the priorities of your stakeholders change all the time so you need a process in place to capture that.
I’m sure a lot of you already have this — but just make sure you prioritize the problems you need to solve at a time to suit you.
This is where your plan comes in. Your plan shouldn’t change too frequently. If it is, then you maybe need to question why.
A good way to prioritize is to have regular sessions. Our research found that 60% of SaaS companies do this either monthly or quarterly. This is a good idea as it gives you the time between sessions to really knuckle down and focus on building features.
Tip #6: Create a Product Feedback Policy
Your product feedback policy governs and lays out the whole process you employ to gather and manage product feedback including how you prioritize what makes it onto your product roadmap.
It tells everyone in your organisation and your customers exactly what your approach to product feedback is, ensuring expectations are properly set right from the start.
A good comparison would be a support SLA or section in an employee handbook.
The best part is that it’s really simple to put together & it will take up very little time.
Here’s a template which also includes links to some great examples from leading SaaS companies.
If you are setting expectations and getting good data from stakeholders, that’s where the super smart product prioritization decisions come from.
Act 3: Prioritization to Create a Balanced Product Roadmap
I hope we’ve got across some best practices. Prioritization is actually about stepping back for a moment and making sure you have the data you need and the right processes in place too.
At the moment a lot of product teams are prioritizing based on a small set of information that’s spread around the organization. Until you’ve got a plan and a separate channel for product ideas and feedback, prioritization is guess work, gut feeling, and a whole lot of politics.
However, there’s a massive opportunity here to make product improvements and add features that really solve the problems of your target customers & drive the growth of the business.
Being able to make these data-informed decisions based on feedback from your customers, teams and the market is what we call Product Demand Intelligence.
The different slices of the pie below, are the 3 inputs into a product roadmap.
And you can actually break those down even further as you can see.
This little graph really emphasises the need for you to capture WHO product feedback and ideas are coming from so you can prioritize effectively.
For example, if your company Plan is to close more Enterprise deals this quarter, there’s no point looking at product feedback from free triallers or users that have churned.
Being able to look at the right sets of prioritized information as and when you need it is the reward for getting the process sorted out.
Originally published at www.receptive.io on March 23, 2018.
