{"id":6296,"date":"2014-10-02T08:45:58","date_gmt":"2014-10-02T08:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/?p=6296"},"modified":"2020-07-30T13:03:52","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T12:03:52","slug":"before-you-plan-your-product-roadmap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/before-you-plan-your-product-roadmap\/","title":{"rendered":"Before you plan your product roadmap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are all your users using all the features in your product? Of course they\u2019re not. Let\u2019s talk about that.<\/p>\n

When planning your roadmap, and where the team spend their time, it\u2019s useful to ask: “How many people are actually using each of our product\u2019s features?” This is product management 101 and will probably take you a few minutes of SQL, or a couple of seconds of Intercom<\/a>. A simple way to visualize this is to plot out all your features on two axes: how many people use a feature, and how often. You\u2019ll most likely see trends like this one.
\n\"Feature
\nThe core of your product is buried in the top right, because that’s what people are actually<\/i> using your product for. Note: exclude administrative features like account creation, password reset, etc. in this exercise. They’re not relevant here; they’re simply a cost of having a product in the first place.<\/p>\n

If you have features in the top left it’s either a sign of a badly adopted feature or they are your enterprise plan features, in which case you’ve thought about this and it’s ok. But you should probably evaluate whether all of your enterprise customers are actually using it.<\/p>\n

An even simpler way to think about it is this: What percentage of your customers or users have adopted each feature<\/i>? You can do this with simple bar charts. Shown here\u00a0is the dream product, this is the one we all think<\/i> we’re designing, when we have Photoshop open. Everyone is going to use & love everything, right…
\n\"Dream
\nAs every product manager knows, the messy reality of a product looks a lot more like this.
\n\"Realistic
\nHow do you get here? You built a product that had a solid messaging, files and a document editing features. These key features were highlighted on your marketing site, documented clearly with great screenshots, included in your product tour, and every new sign-up loved them.<\/p>\n

But success can be a lousy teacher. You believed you could do no wrong and that you could build lots more.<\/p>\n

So you added a chat room, but it didn’t go so well, you kinda botched the launch of it. Then you added a calendar and that went worse, no one created more than one event, and it’s still not even mentioned on your marketing site. Now you’ve built this time tracking features that’s kind of popular, but only with a certain type of user. This is your product, you need to fix this.<\/p>\n

A side note on disruption<\/h3>\n

\"Product
\nIf you’re looking at this sort of feature breakdown, what that tells you is that you have an excellent product for one precise workflow, but you\u2019ve added all these other pieces no one uses. I often think of Hangouts inside Google+ as an example here, or primitive document editing (i.e. B<\/b>U<\/span>I<\/i>) inside Microsoft Word.<\/p>\n

In these cases you are vulnerable to disruption. Someone can build a simple product, focussing on that one key feature that\u2019s superior in just one way (cheaper, faster, collaborative, easier to use, mobile etc), and you\u2019ll struggle to compete.<\/p>\n

What do I do with my feature audit?<\/h2>\n

For any given feature with limited adoption, you have 4 choices:<\/p>\n