How to find what features to build?
Every product manager faces the dilemma of what features to add to the roadmap while strategizing it. Although building a roadmap is time-consuming, if done well, it will sort the direction of your product for the next 3 to 6 months. Since every product and its core goal is different, PMs will have to come up with their own framework but the points mentioned in this article can help to get started.
For anyone to even start creating the product roadmap, it is important to create a product backlog first. In simple terms, a product backlog is all the features, issues, and changes that you would want to implement for your product. It is more like a superset of your product roadmap. But the challenge still remains the same, what features should be added to your roadmap or backlog? Well, here are some of the things that you can do to find out how to explore features to add to the roadmap:
User Interviews
The most important source of truth for your product is your users. These are the people who use your product on a day-to-day basis and have the treasure of ideas waiting to be unlocked. By conducting regular user interviews, PMs can find what their customers have to say about their product and what problems they are facing that can be solved by building certain solutions. Along with user interviews, PMs can also conduct user surveys to understand what the user needs and translate those needs into features.
Tip: It will be useful to have another colleague with you during your customer calls to take notes that you can refer to at a later stage. Also, we may sometimes overlook an important point, so having another set of ears is always beneficial.
Customer Feedback
The true users of your product would like to communicate their dissatisfaction and their problems through various channels such as comments in the app store, feedback surveys, and social media websites. In my opinion, the customer support team is usually the most underutilized resource from a product perspective. By looking at the transcripts or chats of their conversations, you can identify areas of opportunity that need your immediate attention. Since it can get very cumbersome to go through all the transcripts, a word cloud will be able to provide you with the gist of the majority of concerns in a few keywords. You can then pick up those words from the word cloud and read specific transcripts if required to understand the issue in detail.
Insights from the data
Be it the user funnel numbers, the heatmaps, or success metrics, data always helps in identifying opportunities for improvement as well as innovation. By analyzing the data, a PM can understand what part of the products are being used/not used by the users and how they are using them. User funnels combined with success metrics can help in understanding how a particular feature is performing and where exactly any improvement is needed, if at all. Heatmaps, on the other hand, can identify the areas of your product where the most and the least traffic flows.
Team Brainstorming
Design, engineering, or any other team who works on your product can suggest a plethora of features that you as a PM might have not thought of. This is because they might have different thought processes, and look at the product from a different angle. Monthly or quarterly brainstorming calls with your teams can help identify new ideas for your product.
Competitor Analysis
We all know that this is a widely used practice in almost all industries. Every company keeps a close eye on its competitors and what they are doing. Doing a competitive analysis not only helps to understand where your product stands but also can help find certain ideas to work on. From these analyses, you might not find the exact features but can identify the larger themes evolving in the industry. Building and prodding upon these themes can lead to the identification of some features for your product that might also be the problems that your customers might have faced.
Thus, by following the above simple techniques, you will be able to identify features and add them to your product backlog. If your hectic schedule doesn't permit you to undertake such rigorous exercises, go forward with the ‘user interviews’ and ‘data insights’. Also, since a PM can’t build all the features at once, they need to prioritize the backlog and create a product roadmap for a 3 or 6-month period. So, if you are looking for ways to prioritize them, try using this customized version of the RICE framework.
