Feature voting for your product roadmap
Use Case
For products to succeed in the market they must constantly evolve, optimize and meet their users. Product-led growth is state of the art. Owners are challenged with the task to gradually improve the product on various levels and add new features. Building a feature that won't get used can be a big mistake: wasting time & work is a strain for organizations, to small companies it represents an existential threat.
As a product owner you usually have a backlog of ideas, your to-do list. Most items in the product backlog relate to enhancements and new features, doing all is well beyond your organisation's capacity. Choices can be painful, almost like a triage on new features.
Choosing the best feature to build next is a difficult task. Many dependencies are to be considered, any feature-decision comes with advantages and drawbacks.
Besides all the uncertainties there is also good guidance available: your active customers, your users.
Customers use your product on a daily basis. They know what provides value to them and how your product can improve. Letting your customers suggest improvements and vote for new features is a great way of engaging and including their perspective. After all, you and your customers share a common goal: improving the product.
Feature voting gives you the ability to see which improvements are desired most by customers. Feature voting provides a market consensus that would be difficult to identify in 1-on-1 customer meetings. In a space of diverse user perspectives and desires, feature voting identifies trends and majorities.
By voting for new features, customers shape a roadmap towards a win-win situation: better customer benefit and more product success at the same time. A product with happier customers is a better product and a better product leads to greater business growth.
Tool support drives growth. Some general purpose collaboration tools like Trello and Asana are optimized for "love at first sight": you start using it, like it immediately and want to put it to action anywhere in your business. While you can use a general purpose tool for feature voting, it can be a pain because these tools aren't tailor-made for shaping a product roadmap. Productific, in turn, is a feature voting software that gives you additional benefit:
- Customers engage in a dedicated tool, no chunky spreadsheets or task boards
- Customers can contribute new ideas directly via "request new feature", without having to use generic "create task" or "new entry" buttons
- Feature requests are mapped to features in your backlog, you can also ignore requests when they are outside your targets
- Customers can view and vote on existing ideas
- Customers can forward, share and comment ideas - built in
- Customers do not need to go through your support team to influence the product roadmap
- Customers can see which improvements are being worked on and stay engaged
- Ideas are automatically ranked to show the most attractive ones on top
That's all you need for feature voting in a tool.
<TL;DR>
By running feature voting you can find new ideas and turn a list of ideas into a prioritized backlog for your product. Productific is a feature voting software to support this.