User insights drive great products, but how do you know you have them, and you are building the right product?
I like to build Insight-rich roadmaps - these are product roadmaps that are rich with user validation, and low on assumptions.
Let me be clear - I’m not saying you lose your creativity - your intuition as a product leader builds out the roadmap for your product.
But I have seen this pushed too far - where product owners and managers simply say that something is driven by user demand, with little to no real accountability on proving the validity of the insights driving that choice.
This leads to blah roadmaps and blah products, even if they are well designed.
What to do about it?
You need a roadmap that has insights you can trust, built into it.
To do this, I like to force graduation for any item out of the backlog through an insights gate.
If a story/task/bug - anything - comes out of the backlog of ideas and into the roadmap, either in a sprint or into a feature build, it needs to beat the insight benchmark set by you as a team.
I like to ask users to answer these three simple questions with yes or no answers:
- Does this solution solve your problem?
- If this wasn’t released, would you stop using our product?
- I would pay to have access to this feature.
A high-performing item has a yes to all three. The more, the better, and this depends on the number of users you can solicit feedback from, but at least try and get 10 per big rock in your sprint.
These are deliberately designed to give you an immediate sense of urgency and importance around the feature/concept/idea you are launching.
A few words of caution:
- Even if you find that people don’t say yes to all of these questions, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. We love the Kano model of product development - and you need basic and performance needs as much as Delighters. But this approach helps you identify those items that are more likely to be delightful.
- Filter this to your ideal customer profile and your most influential user segment (those users who drive organizational adoption) and weigh the responses accordingly; don’t build delightful features for a persona with no power or influence.
Try adopting this benchmarking model for your roadmap - pull it up and interrogate each item to start improving the quality of your roadmap today.