Product development is broken: Empower your customer-facing teams
elizabeth tobey
405

What we do that works really well in surfacing and taking action on feedback from these parts of the business is hold a quarterly prioritization & alignment workshop (run by the Head of Product), and bring in 1 rep from each department. We put up all the potential features / issues / ideas / frustrations that can potentially be worked on (with super rough engineering estimates) and have each rep try to influence the group on what they think is most important and why (real data always makes a better case — i.e. we’re spending X amount of extra man hours manually dealing with this deficiency in our product and it doesn’t scale, we have to fix it ASAP).

Each rep then gets the same amount of engineering resource spend (a post-it note for each month of an engineers capacity in the company), and we all vote on where we think engineering should spend their time. Really helps bring to light long term product vision and short term hinderances and unblocking real customer issues. More importantly it helps align and bring together all departments on understanding each other better and ultimately a more in-sync organization.