Feature voting for your product roadmap
Use Case
Product Roadmap Voting
For products to succeed in the market they must constantly evolve, optimize and meet their users. Product-led growth is state of the art: for a product to grow exponentially it not only needs to contain some viral distribution aspects, foremost it must make users happy and be optimized to their needs and desires. Successful products are products that make users happy.
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 them 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 when taking decisions: 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 (aka: product roadmap 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 [glossary].
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.