This question will let you own your product roadmap again

Tami Reiss is the founder of The Product Leader Coach where she works with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.

Many product teams struggle with a deluge of requests from customer support and product teams. Figuring out which of the items to have your engineering team build is the reason you have a job as is disappointing your coworkers when their requests don’t make the cut.

Often someone will say “this is really frustrating to ALL customers” or “ALL of my prospects are asking for this” or “the customer will leave if we don’t build it”. Rarely is something the sole reason for churn or win rate. But how can you tell which issues are those with highest value?

With a proper Product Operations data setup, you may have the tools to quantify the impact of each option, but with dozens or hundreds of suggestions that could take up all of your time. The process needs to be streamlined so that there are less requests coming at you to evaluate.

There is one question you can ask your teammates which will very quickly make it clear whether their idea is worthy of the effort to develop.

“What amount of revenue will your request generate?”

It’s that simple. It’s all about the money.

When you start asking this question over and over again, you will communicate to your coworkers what is most important to you is aligned with what is most important to the company… generating more revenue to grow. They will not only learn to respect your objectivity, but also start focusing on overall revenue for the company as well, which is a good perspective for everyone to have. You’ll see that over time, they will only bring you product feature requests with that information included, which will save you the time of evaluating each of them and also make it easier to compare ideas.

Are you asking this question? If not, why not?

(Note: if you are not a B2B company, ask the same question but substitute revenue for whatever your northstar metric is)

Hi! I’m Tami, the founder of The Product Leader Coach where I work with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.

If you enjoyed this post, I am available for product leadership coaching or team training. Learn more about my services and upcoming children’s book.