Opening up our Product Roadmap
Open source proprietary has been a big debate in tech for a long time. It used to be Apple vs Microsoft but the big example of this rivalry now is Apple and Google. There are a lot of pros and cons on both sides: losing your competitive edge versus gaining great insights; total creative control versus harnessing everyone’s creativity. As a product manager, I’d prefer not to retrace that debate now.
But openness isn’t just about writing an API or developing Open Source, it’s also about making your company accountable to your users and putting their needs and concerns first.
That’s why we’re opening up our product roadmap.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a vision for the company and ultimately a product roadmap is a reflection of that vision. But all our users can contribute to the steps we take to get there.
Silicon Valley startups were the first to coin the term “Minimum Viable Product” (big surprise).
They pioneered lean product development and the fast paced world of ship, iterate and ship again, all in the hunt for the elusive product market fit i.e. a proposition that a sizeable number of people will gobble up as fast as you can make it.
That’s now established wisdom. Most tech companies A/B test and ship features behind feature flags. They user test by prototyping, allowing a handful of real users to test and feed information back to the development team in order to fix, iterate or even scrap products that don’t work.
This concept of getting feedback instantaneously from users to make better and more educated decisions has been incredibly useful for building feedback loops that encourage ever-improving feature development.
Eric Ries, the author of “The Lean Startup”, is a big advocate for seeking answers from users as early as possible to get an indication of and confirmation for your product’s potential in the market.
We have the same mentality about product development as a whole. Product managers don’t only ship and iterate but we also need to understand what to build and when to build it. So who better to get input from than our valuable users?
Maintaining your product market fit is almost as important as finding it in the first place.
So new products and features need the same planning, the same iteration and the same stress testing against what users really want.
How we roadmap
The roadmap is driven by three things: business impact, consumer impact and effort. Every roadmap weighs those three factors, balancing the complexity and costs of shipping the product with the value brought to users, whether it’s a highly requested feature or fixing a sub-par experience.
The third, the business impact, takes the effort to build and the value to the customer into account and then compares those factors against the ultimate vision of the company.
At Freetrade we believe that everything we build needs to provide value to our users, whether that value is direct or indirect. That’s why we decided to open up our product roadmap to you to help us build things that matter to you the most. We’ve always tried to be quite vocal on what we are building and keep everyone updated on the progress.
However, as we start working on more and more, we want to have a single point of truth with all the information about what we’re building, planning to build and our long-term vision in the same place.
It will make us much better at translating our users’ priorities into our product development process and help us find that right balance. This might take away from those pleasant surprises of seeing a feature in the app you’ve been waiting for but we’d much rather build the features and products that we know you want than hope for the best when shipping something we thought you’d like.
Our open product roadmap will focus on the high effort items, the highly sought after and our big bet products or features. We hope to give you visibility on our plans, while allowing you to also give feedback on the products we want to ship.
It is of course a dynamic piece, which means that if we don’t see the expected demand or if something crucial comes up, things might get shifted around.
Similarly if we see all of you pulling for a specific feature, we’ll shift things around to build them faster. I will be keeping the roadmap up to date, so do get involved if you have great ideas or feel like we’re missing something.
Outside the roadmap, we’ll still be sneaking in lots of other, smaller features so (and this is the big takeaway) do keep that app up-to-date :)
We’re on a mission to bring fee-free investing to Europe and beyond. 🔥
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