We are spending too much time doing incremental features."
"Engineering spends 80% of their time on customer commitments."
"We need to innovate more."
"Our competition is catching up, we need to find a way to go on the offensive."
Sounds Familiar?
It is hard to balance improving your existing products to satisfy your installed base while launching new products to increase your footprint and capture new markets.
Building a product roadmap that satisfy the needs of both your installed base and capture new market is a constant struggle. I have personally worked on this subject for 10+ years and i came up with a framework that i call the 3 voices. I even developed a free course on this website (check it out, it's free!)
We need to constantly listen to 3 voices:
Existing customers;
Prospects that your sales organization engaged with but decided against your solution;
Your internal/expert views on what you should be doing to disrupt your market. These experts are sometimes your founders but very often are also customer facing individuals like sales engineers, professional consultants that develop some intuitions worth listening to.
You have to listen to these 3 voices but keep their requests on separate lists because they will typically have different business consequences:
If you want to reduce your churn or improve your net expansion; you should listen to your installed base.
If you want to focus on new bookings you should listen to the second group
And if you want to expand your addressable market you should listen to the 3rd group.
When I build a roadmap, I try to understand what are our business imperatives of the moment; new bookings vs. churn reductions vs. get new stuff to sell to expand our market.
Most companies will answer we need them all, but in fact you will experience that depending on what quarters you are in; the priorities change.
My product roadmap is composed of 2 timelines:
The product vision: 2 to 3 years away where we have all the features that will make us an IPO ready start up
and the short term or 2 quarters horizon where we want to focus on one of the 3 voices: deliver features to reduce churn; to support new bookings or innovation.
I tend to rotate the priorities of my short term roadmap based on where I think the company will be few quarters away from now.
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