Product Prioritization: Speed Boat 🚤 ⚓️

Identify what’s slowing your product down

Welcome to ‘Product Prioritization’ — our series of tools, tips, and best practices for the skilled Product Manager to determine priorities and get results. Each month, we will highlight one of the dozens of popular methodologies and explain how to use it.

For our sixth installment, we take a look at a group activity called ‘Speed Boat’.

Venting can be therapeutic, and it and also be incredibly insightful for your product team. There’s valuable information you can take away from understanding what users or your teams hate in your product. The problem can be that complaints can in fast and furious and might not seem actionable.

It’s really easy to focus on the trees instead of the forest and fix a lot of ‘one-off’ things for each complaint.

Early in my career, and in the early stages of a SaaS startup, if an influential user would complain, we’d rally the troops to delight them with a quick fix. Being a young company, we valued individual client satisfaction at the cost of scalability and sustainability.

It wasn’t until later that I came to realize that the opportunity cost of delighting one client could sacrifice the happiness of many clients, especially when the customizations…