Use Your Product Roadmap to Drive Exponential Growth

The commonly accepted statistic is that two-thirds of most products’ features don’t get used by 80% of their customers, at least if you go by data from Pendo. Even at companies such as Google and Bing, 80%-90% of features negatively or neutrally affect the metrics they should improve. At Slack, 70% of all features built to improve monetization do not yield positive results. 

In essence, the primary driver of growth for most software companies – the product roadmap – has a 70% fail rate. Imagine flying on airplanes knowing you’re likely to crash 70% of the time. 

Why is the failure rate so high? Most companies, especially early-stage startups, make product decisions based on anecdotes, gut feeling, and no data. This data is a stark reminder that the product journey must start with humility.

How often have you and the team launched a feature you believe will drive exponential growth only to launch with no significant impact? One or two customers are excited, but it only marginally moves the needle. There is no movement on new customer acquisition or significant retention or upsell changes. Frustrating. 

When building products, the CEO and their product teams must be very mindful of the time to build, the opportunity cost of building one feature versus another, limited customer attention, and limited product real estate. To effectively use your product roadmap to drive growth, you must be very intentional about handling these constraints. 

It’s typical for software companies to measure progress by focusing only on metrics like revenue or MRR, churn rate, retention rate, etc. While those things are very important, they don’t drive growth. They are what we call lagging indicators. 

The critical measures that drive growth are all product related and tie back to customer activity. Customer engagement (active usage) and satisfaction are the foundation for product market fit, revenue growth, retention metrics, etc. The product engagement metrics must trend positive before you’ll get an increase in revenue, retention, expansion, and upsells. 

Your growth will ultimately be driven by iterating your way to higher customer engagement and satisfaction, driven by what you build, how quickly you build it, how you present it, and what you learn. 

Every feature must answer the following questions: Does building this drive higher engagement from existing ideal and happy customers? Will it increase the customer satisfaction of existing high-engagement customers? You can make sure your features answer those questions by using the following framework.

Leverage Experimentation

First, be comfortable with research-oriented experimentation. For example, is there a way to get data around increasing engagement before building a feature? There are a few ways to do this. Can you test a feature as email content and gauge open and click-through rates before actually building it and making it a feature on your dashboard? Or, can you use a survey to gather insights before building a feature? Experiments like these help you gather data on how your customers will respond to new features before building them.

Prioritize Engaged Customers

Second, build first for existing and highly engaged customers before prioritizing new customer acquisition features. 

There is the tendency to always chase higher close rates with new prospects who don’t convert to paying, but the surer growth path is to increase engagement from satisfied customers and then find more of the same type of customers. Use customer conversations, surveys, and support channels, to tease out what paying, highly engaged customers want. This journey is all about finding your high-leverage points. Go for the features with the highest impact, with the most requests first. Your time is limited, and your product real estate is limited. Go with what you know will keep your existing customers around before trying to woo new ones.

Think About the Full Life Cycle

Third, build the “learning & selling” of new features into your roadmap. It’s not just about building features; it’s also about effective presentation and ease of use for the customer. 

Each release should consider the full life cycle of acquisition, activation, retention, and referral per feature. 

This goes beyond email outreach to announce a new feature. If it’s high-impact, your new feature should have an obvious placement in your product real estate without making other high-impact features less obvious or more difficult, then have an easy way for customers to activate usage, increase usage, and be delighted enough to talk about it. If this is overly complicated, it may be a sign that the feature isn’t what customers need or want, or your understanding is incomplete.

Track Adoption

Finally, measure adoption. Find the appropriate adoption north star metric for your application and measure how each feature impacts it. For example, if you’re creating content, then measure content output count per customer, relevance, and the average time it takes to create new content. All product efforts should be gauged on how they positively impact your target metrics. 

If your business metrics are not improving, question whether you have the right product metrics or how valuable your product truly is for the customers you’ve chosen to serve. 

Remember, your ultimate goal is to maximize business outcome and impact, not product release output. You can have the coolest features around, but if you’re not retaining customers, it won’t matter. Again, the point of product development is to drive growth. Growth comes from customer engagement and retention, not new features. Stay focused on what truly matters.

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