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- We can’t build everything customers ask for!
- 1) Parse
- Customers love to make their feature requests in the form of the solution, not eh problem
- “What are you actually trying to accomplish with this?”
- Example: feature to send an arbitrary HTTP post to a certain endpoint
- What do you really want?
- Oh, an integration with XYZ
- So what we should really build is that integration
- Looking for consensus. Patterns. Lots of people with the same pain point
- 2) Synthesize
- Distill the problem down into what the best SOLUTION is
- Whiteboard
- Crazy ideas
- The best ideas start with “this is gonna sound stupid, but…”
- 3) Prioritize
- 2 essential questions
- Is this going to help us gain new customers?
- Is this going to help us retain existing customers?
- If yes to both, probably good to build in the near term
- If it’s no, it may not be worth building in the near term
- We don’t plan too long term. We try to plan out 60-90 days into the future
- Do we have the resources on board right now to actually build this right now?
- 2 essential questions
- 4) Build
- Hammer down the scope as small as possible
- Get it to customers as early as you can
- Recent example: customers wanted ability to merge two subscribers in Drip
- Put it off for a long time
- Lot of work
- Hammered it down to only merging tags and custom fields
- Could knock it out in about 6 weeks
- Get it out early, get feedback
- If it solved 80% of the problems, can probably stop there.
- If they need more functionality, we can circle back
- Derrick Reimer
www.scalingsaas.com
@derrickreimer
