SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Your Untapped Resource for Creating a Compelling Product Roadmap
06 Jul 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm very excited to share this recording with you guys, which happened at our conference, sasopen.com, with over 100 speakers, all founders of B2B SaaS companies. We have a very high bar for what speakers share on stage, so you're going to enjoy this episode where we dive deep into revenue graphs, real tactics, and real growth metrics.
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So today we're going to talk about creating a compelling product roadmap with a particular untapped resource. This is the weirdest remote I've ever seen. I'm sorry. The green button? Green arrow. Questionable on if it's an arrow. But anyway, UX-wise, so I started in UX. This is not very usable. Here we go.
So over the next 20 minutes, I'm going to talk to you about the roadmap challenges that we face when we're building products. I'm going to talk to you about what's that untapped resource that we should be working with. And then finally, we'll talk about how do you partner there so that you get the most effective results. Our typical product roadmap has lots of pieces.
It has lots of swim lanes, if you will. And it often has lots and lots of features. When you're building a product roadmap, especially if you have a larger product, you can think, huh, oh, sorry. So let's talk about the problems with your product roadmap. The first one is shiny feature bias. The second one is hippos and other influences.
And the third one is that there's churn by 1,000 tiny cuts while you're building all these things. Shiny feature bias. The big problem with your roadmap is it's full of features. Somebody said it on the last stage I was in in the founder room. Features don't get you customers, right? Nobody wants your product for its own sake. Nobody wants to use it.
If they could not use your product and do the thing they need to do, they would not use your product. Most people are not using your product to do the thing that they need to do that your product solves. So when you build new features... You're building things that people don't necessarily want.
And you're ignoring all the current UI problems that you have, the things that get in people's way when they actually want to get something done. This is really important because new features sound exciting, right? How many times have you been like, oh, this is going to be so good? New features. Customers tell us all the time, oh, if you just build this, I'll buy it. They're not going to buy it.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do product roadmaps typically face?
But instead it says, men, chat with us, because the chat is overlaying the menu that I now can't tap on. This happens all the time. Everybody's product, everybody's website, we all have those chat pop-ups. I can't tell you the number of times that I can't access the thing I need because your chat pop-up is in the way. Ah! Then there's this one.
This is a scheduling app that looks like a movie theater seating chart, and I'm very confused about it. I'm not sure if I'm scheduling with someone what I'm supposed to do here. Here's another one. Netflix was like, because you watched Coco, would you like to watch Coco? Yes, that seems right. I'll just watch it again. If I'm five, maybe, fair. But this is on my adult Netflix account.
And then shipping method, free shipping or free shipping two? Which one would you like? These are easy to find. I actually have a whole database of these because I'm a UX person. There are tons of things in your app that just don't work well.
And when your roadmap doesn't account for those, people start churning because they get frustrated because somebody scrappier and newer comes out and creates something better that feels less hard. If you don't solve that one core problem well, it doesn't matter what other features you have. But how do you know what things to solve? Well, that's where your untapped resource comes in.
Surprise, it's customer success. I know, I thought you were, I was going to say UX. Customer success is important. And there are three things we're going to talk about here. We're going to talk about why customer success is so valuable, what's the challenge in working with customer success, and what opportunities does customer success present. So customer success gets 4,000 average-wise
Calls per month. That's 4,000 qualitative data points. And I want to talk for a second about qualitative and quantitative because we work a lot with numbers, right? Follow the numbers. Data doesn't lie. Data lies. Sorry. Quantitative is not better than qualitative, and here's why.
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Chapter 3: How does shiny feature bias affect product development?
Let's say last year in my company I made $6 million in revenue. Good or bad? Do you know? No, you don't know. Sounds good on the surface. Six million is not a bad number. Nice job. Better than 20. What if I said the year before I made 10 million? Now is that six million good or bad?
What if I said that year I made 10 million, I was only 10% profitable, but the year I made six million, I was 50% profitable. Now is that six million good or bad? Have the numbers changed? No, has your perception of good or bad about them changed? Numbers are subjective because we give them meaning.
Six million is always six million, that's why numbers are objective because the quantity doesn't change. But what we believe about it and the decisions we make because of it, that's the thing that change and that's why quantitative data is just as subjective as qualitative data. The other problem with quantitative data, it doesn't tell you why.
If I have 50 people sign up for my newsletter, I don't know why they did. And then I have 50 people unsubscribe. I don't know why they did. Yes, they offer that little thing. That's rarely the reason, right? Those little surveys that say, why did you unsubscribe? You don't know. Why is someone churning? You give them a survey. They have five options. They might pick one. They might not.
They might offer you a text box.
Tell them.
Tell us why you're churning. Sometimes companies make this require. When they make that required, I type in the box, please don't require me to fill this out for you. That's not helpful information. So when you're looking at quantitative data, that can be helpful to tell you what you should pay attention to.
But qualitative data tells you why something is happening and what you should actually do about it. And the one place in your company that has the most qualitative data, unfortunately, isn't UX, even though I would love it to be. But in UX research, you can't talk to 4,000 people in a month, most months. Customer success is already doing that. So what's the challenge?
Well, most customer success systems, They don't deliver information that's valuable for product teams, right? They deliver information that's valuable for customer success teams. Like, how long does it take people to solve an issue? I was on chat with American Express for five hours last Friday trying to resolve an issue.
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Chapter 4: What role do hippos play in product decision-making?
Nine times out of ten, when I'm talking to someone in customer success, they're like, yeah, we weren't ready for that. No one told us it was coming. And they're trying to troubleshoot lots of problems that they just have nothing. They're figuring out with you on the phone. It's frustrating. Treat them as important as your hippos, right?
Because they actually have the most meaningful data, because they are talking to customers day in and day out. Build a monthly roundtable where customer suggests just gets to come and share all the things that they remember hearing that month. It's better than nothing, and it starts to build trust. So then they're going to want to fill out your form.
Because if they don't trust you and they don't believe you're going to do anything with it, they're not going to fill out your form. They've got a lot to do, and they're measured on call time, call volume, reduction in churn, things like that. Caring about your form is another thing they have to do, but it's so valuable for the company, for their success, and for your success.
And the sooner that you can help them understand that and build a system that works for all of you. So I made this form and this thing. It may not work for your team, but if you work with customer success, you'll find something that will. And the last thing that working with customer success lets you do is reverse engineer roadmap decisions. And I alluded to this earlier, right?
Sometimes something ends up on the roadmap, and you're not sure if it's a good idea. Sometimes your CEO says, oh, we need to build this thing. And you're going, no, that's not the thing. Customers don't need that. Now you have at your fingertips data to potentially have that conversation, as opposed to waiting a month and doing some research in real time.
You may already know that's not a good decision, and you can prove it because you have customer success data. And then it's not your opinion versus your CEO's. it makes that conversation much easier.
So those roadmap things that might not be as good to do or those features you might be excited about, you might be able to justify moving them around with the data you've already gotten from customer success. How powerful would that be for you? So over the last 20 minutes, we talked about some of the huge challenges with your roadmap as a product.
the untapped resource, customer success, and why they matter and why it's hard, and then how to make it better. So that's the end of my talk. I'd love to hear from you. What questions do you have? I've got about five minutes. Thank you. Yeah, go ahead.
You said you had that air table. Is that something...
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