You Got a Great Idea for a New Feature, Now What’s Next for Your AWS Product Roadmap?
As a product owner, you work closely with your product team and customers, making you the important person responsible for the AWS product roadmap. No one else is expected to understand customer needs and market trends better than you. You are driven not only to identify proactively and reactively any future service improvements and new features, but also to develop entirely new products and services that target new unmet needs in the market. That is the level of foresight you need to have.
You are expected to lead the product strategy within your business and make sure the strategy and roadmap is aligned with your organization’s vision and goals.
As product owner you are the bridge between the organization & delivery, ensuring solutions deliver value. To do this, as best practice you run annual product strategy sessions involving the main functional leaders who engage directly or indirectly with your customers. At this stage, you develop the vision for your product strategy for the upcoming year and build a list of product backlog.
It is after this step that many product owners encounter a challenge.
Sure, you know what features have to be added, but do you know how to prioritize what to work on in the coming year? Ideally you would love to not only develop and implement all the ideas you got for new features & improvements but also build new products from scratch. But, realistically speaking, in this fast-paced age of cloud pioneered by AWS, there is a limit on resources and time that are available to you. So, you must prioritize in the right manner.
Effective prioritization means you need to have the right parameters in mind. An expert product owner is going to be the one who can identify the right parameters early on and effortlessly incorporate these into the process.
Before it becomes second nature, we have an aid to help you prioritize — in line with Design Thinking philosophy and our experience consulting for AWS partners, we recommend that product owners start with the following 3 foundational parameters:
1. Feasibility with your AWS product capability
Feasibility means the capability you have both internally and externally to build and deliver the idea successfully. To assess feasibility ensure you take into consideration the following aspects in the Business Model Canvas:
- Key Partners: 3rd party vendors or partners involved to create and deliver
- Key Activities: Tasks expected to be done regularly to deliver
- Key Resources: Internal talent and tooling
2. Desirability for your AWS product
Desirability is the external desire for such a feature or product among your customers. This parameter also covers the internal desire and drivers within your organization for the product. To understand the desirability take into account the following aspects in the Business Model Canvas:
- Customer relationships: Channels to be used for service delivery, sales engagement and marketing
- Customer segments: Taking existing customers’ needs or new markets’ desire into consideration
- Company Vision: Alignment with the company’s vision and goals
3. Viability aligned against your product strategy
Viability means the potential of generating profits when the product or feature is implemented successfully. To see how viable a feature is, assess it against these 2 aspects in the Business Model Canvas:
- Revenue Streams: Simplistic Total Addressable Market value or similar “back of napkin” estimate of potential revenue
- Cost Structure: High level costing to build the idea out
An example to make sense of all this
Consider yourself as product owner at a cloud contact center SaaS company. As the leader you are always looking for ways to enhance your product by addressing the key needs of our customers. Based on what you have heard from your customers you understand that many customers are looking to integrate their CRM data with their contact center, i.e. Desirability, to provide a seamless and personalized experience to their customers. In light of this, the recent news about Amazon Connect’s integration with Salesforce presents a valuable opportunity, i.e. Feasibility, for you to address this need by incorporating this integration into our product.
For example, the integration can help improve customer engagement by providing agents with real-time access to customer information, allowing for more personalized interactions. It can also help streamline workflows by automating certain tasks, such as call logging and data entry. These benefits not only improve the customer experience but also increase efficiency and productivity for our customers. Therefore this integration has the potential to bring in value expansion, i.e. Viability, for our product by providing additional capabilities and benefits to our customers.
By incorporating these 3 parameters into your product development process will allow you to thoroughly evaluate the potential features for how valuable it can be. By doing so, you can prioritize your efforts, maximize your resources, and provide the most value to your customers while also expanding your product’s capabilities and market appeal.
Conclusion
In conclusion, as a product owner, you have the challenging yet exciting task of developing your AWS product roadmap. It’s essential to keep in mind the feasibility, desirability, and viability parameters to prioritize your ideas effectively. As an expert who has worked with CPOs & product managers, I recommend assessing your ideas against these three foundational parameters to score and prioritize your features, enhancements, and product development ideas. It’s important to pursue and incorporate high-priority ideas into your annual product strategy. Additionally, we suggest considering other parameters that reflect what is important to your business to achieve the best results. By applying these principles, you can stay on top of market trends, align your product strategy with your organization’s vision and goals, and deliver valuable solutions to your customers.
Remember, it’s not just about having great ideas; it’s about implementing them in a way that maximizes their value for both your customers and your business.
This post is an updated version of my blog article that originally appeared on: https://veup.com/you-got-a-great-idea-for-a-new-feature-now-what/
