How do early stage teams deal with the thrash of customer requests against the product roadmap?

Meera Kanani
2 replies
There are always competing priorities! Leading an early stage company, half your job is just prioritization. Effective prioritization can help mitigate the roadmap thrash but it doesn't help solve the day to day noise that steals our focus. Would love to hear strategies for staying focused on the micro and macro level.

Replies

Navin Peiris
It can be really hard in the early stages, specially cos they all feel like they’re important and they might lead to more conversions. My advice is to just reply back to the customer thanking them and letting them know it’s been put up for consideration, that way they feel heard, and put it in the backlog somewhere and keep going with the plan. Leave half a day every week to groom those requests, and prioritise them according to how many people have requested for that feature, how well it fits with the current vision, and if it’s blocking those users from converting. Not tackling each and every request might feel like you’re disappointing a potential customer, but it’s also one way that can disrupt all the momentum and flow pretty badly.
Frank Sondors
Being a young company, here at Salesforge.ai we use Canny.io to prioritize requests from day zero to see what is it that users really want us to build. I've seen it work really well in many companies.