How Customers View your Product Roadmap

In conversations with founders over the years, I used to hear how they felt their product was “far from perfect.” And I replied every time with the same response, “It’s never going to be perfect. It’s software. It’s expected to be imperfect!” The software industry is imperfect by its very nature. Software solutions are supposed to be built and improved upon over time — therefore, optimizing for perfection is a battle lost before it starts. What’s required is a clear, data-driven product roadmap that helps maintain a laser-like focus on meeting changing current and future customer needs. 

A mistake many early founders make is that they’re simply too insular about the process of building and forecasting their company’s product. They think about it from the perspective of their own success and bottom line, rather than from the vantage point of a customer. It is your customers who will tell you, through their behavior and needs, how to best position your product. And knowing that not every customer is the same, the market you operate in will provide some direction on where you need to focus. These and other factors will ultimately direct, how best to move forward as you mature. 

What’s important, especially early on, is how you position your product for clearly solving a customer problem. Correctly positioning your product creates the basis for an effective roadmap and good customer relationships, because good positioning focuses on clear outcomes. Determine first what you want the customer experience to be like with your product, and then let the product follow. 

This is simply not given enough weight in most product roadmaps. Customer experience isn’t just about using the product. It’s about the sale, the deployment, upgrades and updates, integrations, building customer success teams, communicating issues — all of these functions need to be a well-defined pillar of your innovation strategy, not an afterthought.  I’ll aim to cover some of these areas in future posts but will start with advocating for how companies should focus on a more data driven approach to product development relating to roadmaps. 

When I made the move to become CIO of Pure Storage, many of my peers wondered what I was doing joining a data storage company considering how many group therapy discussions we had had about the industry. When the company was founded, I’m sure IT teams were not wishing for yet another storage vendor to show up and pitch to them. What they were looking for was a far better experience with a critical infrastructure product.  A number of products I had bought in the past provided a sub optimal experience - buy more, manage teams to maintain and keep uptime, expect failures and ensuing fire drills to fix and carry on. The roadmaps for these products were largely non-existent and far from compelling. 

The experience with Pure Storage was far different - simple to purchase, to install, to maintain and most critically as it provided telemetry on product performance.  By doing so, the company was able to provide proactive support to customers and remove a support burden off IT teams. Is your product architectured in a way for you to get insights on how your solution is being used? Do you have telemetry in place that allows for a data driven approach to product development? Most technology vendors still don’t have good quality data coming back from their customers. This is not only a missed opportunity to provide proactive support, but essentially renders it impossible to evolve your product roadmap in parallel with customer needs.  

By the same token, it’s critical to partner and build systems with your sales team when developing a roadmap. When companies lose sales on features or price or performance, that needs to be recorded and tracked. Most companies are not set up to have a good communication cadence or systems in place to close such a critical feedback loop.  Building more rigor in sales enablement and leadership requires understanding when you lose deals and why. This feeds even more actionable data into the equation. 

A cohesive relationship between product and sales helps establish the right expectations for customers, which is a prerequisite for celebrating success when it happens. Knowing your value and what you best deliver allows you to understand where your product will fit within an enterprise's business architecture. This also requires a fundamental understanding of what your product can’t or shouldn’t do. People respond to honesty and certainty, even if it’s not what they’d like to hear in an ideal world. When you say you can’t do something it doesn’t make you look weak — it makes you look real. 

People respond to honesty and certainty, even if it’s not what they’d like to hear in an ideal world.

The best product roadmaps are ones that can demonstrate a programmatic approach. Customers want to know how you come to make product decisions. In addition to understanding how the product fits into a company’s architecture, it’s also important to evaluate how easy or difficult it will be to integrate new features and functionality within that environment. Some companies have architected for integration, others have not, or are built on legacy providers that will pose new sets of challenges to you as a vendor. 

Customers want to know why you built this product, what integrations have worked and which haven’t, and what to look for in the future. Communication is key — people will be patient and wait instead of changing vendors, as long as they know something they need is on the way. 

Zoom’s Laser Focus

I’ll lean on Zoom as an example, given just how many of us became customers overnight. Zoom was ready for that explosion because they’d worked closely with early customers to understand their needs. They focused on core functionalities that gave users the experience they wanted, and didn’t spend effort on superfluous once-upon-a-time ideas that had long ago been wiped off the roadmap by reality. 

Pure Listened to What Customers Wanted

Pure Storage is another company that was very definitive in its strategy, and clear about the value it delivered to customers. The value was in the performance, and previously unachieved levels  of user friendliness that were uncommon in enterprise tech and are now considered table stakes. Pure’s early products didn’t have all the bells, whistles or functionality their competitors could offer, and in some cases lost deals as a result. The vast majority of the time, a few missing features simply didn’t matter. Pure listened to what customers wanted — an intuitive product designed to perform a complex function — and delivered at every possible turn. As a result, their brand loyalty in the industry is unparalleled. Additionally, the company was abie to not only get telemetry from it’s products but build systems internally that allowed to capture what was happening in the field and relay that back to engineering and product teams. 

Finally, as a founder you need to be able to reflect on the vision you have for your company. Where is the world headed, and where do you want to go within that new reality? This, too, requires a deep understanding of your customers and their needs. Know that the roadmap outlines not only where the product is going but also the type of company you are building. Think about the experience you need to bring in as you go into a new vertical whether that is for sales or solution engineering. The product roadmap helps to drive the roadmap for the company. Knowing that will help you take a deeper look at the product you want to provide to your customers as well as the company you hope to lead.