In a B2B SaaS startup, what is the best way to prioritize product features and build a product roadmap?

Use Lean start-up principles. Develop minimum viable product (MVP)...

Jeff is right on here; your feature priorities must be driven by yo...

Assuming you have no trouble coming up with ideas, you are going to...

Read my blog on this topic and see if this he...

What is your primary goal? If your goal is to retain your current customers (maybe you have a retention problem), then focus on understanding the needs of your current customers/users. If you understand why they are leaving -- and what will make them stay -- then you can understand on what to focus. If your goal is to get more customers like your current customers (maybe your current customers love you, you just need more customers like them), then focus on understanding why people aren't buying. Are they just not aware of you? Do they find you and then get turned off for some reason? Prioritize your features and roadmap on the things that will get new customers. If your goal is to get existing customers to spend more money with you, then focus on what additional/related needs they have that they will pay to have solved. Focus your features and roadmap on things that will increase your wallet share with your current customers -- likely by replacing other products they are currently using. If your goal is to get new customers who are different than your current customers (maybe you have traditionally focused on companies under 10 employees and now you're looking at companies from 11-20 employees), then focus on the needs of those prospects and how those may differ than the needs of your current customers. If there are reasons those new buyers aren't buying, you need to focus your features and roadmap there. "Listening to your customers" is good general advice, but if your strategy and goals are #2 or #4, that approach won't work (and for #3 it may lead to investments that don't actually generate any more revenue). Obviously you need to listen to your existing customers -- in a SaaS business, you rely on them for revenue -- and part of your roadmap will likely always be to enhance the product appropraitely for current customers and users. However, depending on your strategy and business goals, myopic focus on just your current customers may actually work against you. This is especially the case if you are trying enter a new markets or attract a new type of customer.

When it comes to feature prioritization, there are just three core factors to focus on:(Note: This post was originally published in the Chargebee blog: https://www.chargebee.com/blog/saas-product-feature-prioritization/)1. Sticking to your vision:It might seem easy to carry out, but having conviction to your core values can get tricky. You have to resist the ever-so-persistent temptation of becoming a Yes-Man.By saying “Yes!” to every other feature request and by having your finger in too many pies, you’ll only take your product further and further away from what it was meant to solve in the first place. Only include those features that fit your vision. Get rid of the clutter and noise. “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say “no” to almost everything.” -Warren Buffett In spite of users calling them as being  “http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/basecampprojectmanagementblindedbyideology/”, Basecamp firmly refused to provide GANTT charts in their product.Why? They believed that GANTT charts are not required for good project management, and they committed to that ideology. They’ve stood by that philosophy till date. In fact, they recommend companies to read their feature requests, and then simply https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Forget_Feature_Requests.php.The Basecamp team says that if a feature is crucial, the team just couldn’t miss it, as they’d be reminded about it almost every single day; there was no need to list down and analyse the feature requests. Outrageous, yet insightful.It’s the era of instant gratification, and every prospect or customer wants what they want as soon as possible. And in such situations, companies succumb to the short-term goals of satisfying a customer or converting a lead, while losing sight of the long-term objectives.Before nodding yes, ask yourself if the feature will still carry weight after five years.Nathan Kontny from Highrise http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/first-principles---what-s_b_9328268.html that feature requests from individual customers are in fact symptoms of the underlying generic problem causing them.So instead of solving one-off favors, dig deeper into the request, figure out the root cause, and then tackle that. Make a trade-off by disappointing a single user initially, to create a much larger impact for all your customers in general. http://hubpages.com/business/5-Whys-root-cause-analysis#2. Looking at the other side of the kitchen:One of the major product management misconceptions is assuming that a product’s features and it users’ needs match perfectly. This notion almost always leads to overloading the product with too many features, most of which won’t make the slightest difference to the customer. In short, Feature Creep. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1qzgfq/my_buddy_dadproofing_his_remotes/To evaluate the significance of feature requests, the Intercom team https://blog.intercom.io/prioritising-features-wholl-use-it-how-often/ that compares the number of users and the frequency of usage. And yes, they focus on the top right corner - the stars. And the top left corner? That’s the danger zone for you. If you find yourself building features that only have a handful of users, then your product is alarmingly close to becoming a bloatware. “When you’re drawing the line around your software, be sure you’re not leaving in marginal utility features in an attempt to add more value. These little wannabe-features hang around unloved, bloating your app, hogging the UI and adding to maintenance costs. These things can be fatal to start-ups.” -Des Traynor, Co-founder, Intercom 3. Playing the hands right:Don’t bite more than you can chew. Which feature is worth the limited time and energy that you have? Which can wait?In terms of resources, there are two main aspects to consider: Cost (coding, UI, reusability of existing codes or designs, testing, documentation) Risk (technical complexities, requirement of new/unfamiliar tools/technologies) Apart from those obvious constraints, there’s another major constraint that causes hiccups in feature prioritization, and that’s the conflict of ideas between the developers and the non-developers.This is where the concept of “http://www.mironov.com/4laws1/” comes into play, where everyone with a feature request poses an AND mindset (every new request is monumentally important, and can be squeezed into the already packed to-do list); while on the other hand, the ones receiving the requests, have an EXCLUSIVE-OR world (it’s either this feature or that, not both). And thus, the mismatch ensues. http://www.carlandsteve.com/?p=125The keyword here is Communication. Just by https://m.signalvnoise.com/everything-is-possible-but-nothing-is-free-714b835e8db3#.wugtmipjs in which a feature is requested, you can improve the thought process of evaluating its importance.Rather than posing rhetorical (“Is building this feature possible?”) or vague (“Will building this feature be easy?”) questions to your developers, try out this straightforward approach instead: I would like to have this and I’m willing to pay up to that. “The catch with framing the request like that is it requires the person asking to make the hard analysis. How much is my request really worth? What other things would I give up to have this thing instead? It forces them to bargain with reality, which is much less appealing than charming the developer fairy into just giving them want they want, no sacrifices needed.” -DHH, Founder and CTO at Basecamp Effective and transparent communication leads to clear prioritization.At Chargebee, the feature requests are listed down in one place, along with their corresponding customer support tickets, and comments from the team members.The product team then grades the difficulty level of each feature, matches it with the available skill set, and upvotes it depending on the results. And like a trending blog post, a feature moves up the priority list as it receives more and more upvotes. This way, we ensure that everyone in the team are on the same page.Conclusion:Research shows that consumers love a truckload of features while buying a product, and once they become users, they get overwhelmed by the same. As soon as they’re onboard, they experience “http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/files/Documents/Faculty/FeatureFatigueWhenProductCapabilitiesBecomeTooMuchOfAGoodThing.pdf”, which invariably shortens their LTV.A smarter approach is to offer specialized products with a limited number of features that actually matter, instead of stuffing a hoard of features in a single product.At Hubspot, they maintain a document called an MSPOT (Mission, Strategy, Projects, Omissions, Tracking), which is regularly reviewed in their management team meetings.And according to Brian Halligan, the CEO, the most important section of the document is the https://readthink.com/scale-up-leadership-lessons-i-ve-learned-over-9-years-as-hubspot-s-ceo-39521f5b7567#.se9kyl4np, which consists of the projects that weren’t taken up by the company that year. It helps in limiting his appetite so that he doesn’t overstuff the organization, he says.As Dave Packard famously stated, be it a restaurant or a SaaS firm, more companies die of indigestion than starvation.

This was a massive issue in our last B2B SaaS startup (we were doing order control & stock management for SMBs) so we built https://receptive.io to solve our own pain point. The best way to prioritize features is to understand what's important to the different groups that have an influence on product direction. It's only when you know what's important to who & why that you can use data to make informed decisions about what you should build. Decisions should always be made within the framework of your product and company strategy, but you need to have the data available in the first place to base your decisions on.I recently wrote about https://receptive.io/blog/2016/01/19/highest_impact_features_you_can_build_right_now.htmlHere's a quick run down of Receptive's main features some of which taken from a related post I've just commented on:Propose feature requests You add a small piece of code to your site and it then allows users to jump straight across into Receptive to add, discuss, vote on and prioritize feature requests. Here's a https://receptive.io/blog/pages/case_studies/veeqo.html which includes an image showing how a company using our software has exposed the link to their customers. See all proposals & vote Users can see all proposals and vote for which they are interested in. However, the important part is that they are asked to prioritize their requests. A list with votes doesn't tell you a great deal. Understanding the prioritization of requests from all your different customer groups is gold dust. More on Receptive's customer view can be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMW17LrVA6o.  Status of features is clear Every request has a clear status shown. There's also a release log (great for showing Customers progress), product roadmap which you can choose to share with customers and/or publicly (https://receptive.io/app/#/roadmap/6d730a9f-02f1-4e49-9550-fa0ab23d243d) and the best part is that Customers are automatically notified as feature status changes. Good case study on the https://receptive.io/blog/pages/case_studies/agorapulse.html:“Not having any idea of where a company is heading forces customers out the door, while transparency keeps the right customers in. If a customer is considering leaving, but you have some important features on your roadmap, that may change their mind.” Emeric, CEO at AgoraPulse Simple + quick Recent quote from a customer about the integration:"No implementation problems at all - it's more or less copy & paste, so it was really really easy" Matt Lanham, CEO & Founder at GeckoLabsWe also get tons of lovely comments about how clean, simple and easy the UI is!Finally, we https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL-Qc4B9Bm0 so you can understand which requests are going to be worth building. Good luck to you!

As mentioned, the first question you need to ask yourself is: What's your objective? Are you trying the optimize the product by improving customer engagement / retention and monetization? Are you trying to grow the customer base by expanding customer accounts or by bringing in new / different customer types? You want to prioritize features that: Reduce customer pain: Solve problems that are painful, current and aligned with business priorities. Increase customer gain: Increase Return on Investment (ROI), efficiency and perceived value. Now, if you're optimizing the product, speak with your current users / customers to understand their pain points and value drivers. Doing a Feature Value Analysis or a Kano Analysis (more complex) allows you to understand what is valuable in the eyes of your customers. If you're in growth mode, you want to speak with non-users and non-customers from the segment you're targeting to understand their problems and the gains they seek with your solution.  As mentioned, businesses rarely tackle only 1 objective at a time. To that end, it's important to also prioritize between objectives. Related resources: http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/191076/Feature-Value-Analysis-The-Supreme-Growth-Hack http://foldingburritos.com/kano-model/ -- For those who found this answer useful, I'd like to add a short plug for my  book, Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want. It's available now on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1495296601/

I think these are all reasonable approaches, but ultimately none will truly leave you with a defensible list of priorities.  At http://www.aha.io we believe you must start with alignment around the key strategic product drivers. This is related to answer, but we don't believe there is one primary goal. You likely have 3-5 key strategic drivers that you want to accomplish over the next 3-12 months. Once there is agreement on the strategic drivers, you then need a way to score features against your core goals. In our previous companies we used spreadsheets to do this, but we wanted to make it easier for product managers and engineering teams to collaborate when assessing the importance of features. We do this via Aha! Scorecards which allow your team to rank the importance of a feature -- thus creating an http://www.aha.io/product/features/features for each feature that can be compared to all of the other features. You can fully customize the metrics, scale, and weights that are used to add quantification to your features. Scorecards are used on the features page. So, start with the agreed upon strategic product initiatives and then rank your features against them. Do some basic effort estimation and the product priorities will reveal themselves.