Do you have a clear idea of what to build next and are you building the right features? Prioritizing your roadmap can be tricky and it's useful to use a structured approach to make sure you're spending your time and effort on the right things.

Follow these four steps to prioritize your work and assemble a product roadmap with your top priorities.

1. Gather product feedback & feature requests

The starting point for prioritizing your product roadmap is to gather all of your feature requests and product feedback in one place so that you can get an overview. You want to keep track of which customer has shared the feedback or requested a feature and also how many of your customers are requesting the same feature.

When you gather feedback, it's also important to understand the feedback and what your customers are really asking for. Ask questions to find out what the customer's use case is, why they are requesting the feature, and what the underlying problem is. You can also ask how important the feedback is to them. Once you know the details about the feedback, you can test your proposed solutions with these customers to make sure you're on the same page.

, you gather all your feedback in one place and know who has requested what and how many of your customers are requesting the same thing. You can also ask questions and communicate directly with the customers asking for a certain feature. Read more about 

Some product development does not stem directly from customer feedback but instead from the strategic direction that you want to take your product. Say, for example, that you want to improve your conversion rate from free trial to paid. In that case, you need to dig in to your data to figure out what the potential improvements could be. You probably already have a list of strategic improvements that you want to make, but that your customers are not asking specifically for.

3. Prioritize the product improvements & features

You should now have a nice overview of your product feedback with a good understanding of the solution to each feedback as well as a list of your strategic improvements. It's now time to prioritize these product improvements and features to make sure you're working on the most important things.

I suggest using a product prioritization framework to help you clarity what the most important things are. There are several popular product prioritization frameworks that you could use. The Value vs. Effort matrix is a good starting point. Other popular frameworks are 

The Value vs. Effort matrix is a good starting point for product prioritization. The basis is that for each product feature, you rank the value to the customers & your business and the effort required to build it.

. How much value will your customers get from this feature or improvement ? This is where the data that you gathered together with your product feedback comes in. Is this something that a lot of your customers are asking for? Is this important to your strategic customers? It's also important to tie the customer value back to the value for your business. Will it help you grow? Is it aligned with your product vision and strategic direction?

 This is how much effort it will take or how much it will cost it to develop and maintain the feature. One part of the cost is the time required to build the feature, but remember to consider the costs to the product and organization as a whole and how much it will cost you to maintain it.

Once you have scored the value and effort for each feature or initiative, you can map the results on a 2 by 2 matrix. It's up to you which scale to use when scoring the features. The important point is that the scale should help you differentiate between the features and rank them relative to each other, so you don't want to use something too simple. You could also skip the numeric scale and plot the features visually.

The matrix has 4 main quadrants that helps you prioritize:

 Anything in the top left quadrant (high value, low effort) are easy wins. Make these your top priority.

. Projects in the "maybe" quadrants (top right and bottom left) can make sense to do. In the bottom left quadrant you have features that aren't likely to move the needle for you. In the top right, you have important projects but that could be too risky to take on.

 Stay away from anything in the "no" quadrant (bottom right). These are a waste of time.

You now have a list of your top priority features and it's time to put them on a roadmap. Roadmaps for SaaS companies are typically timeline or time horizons based.

. Shows your roadmap on a timeline with planned release dates (usually not specific dates, but months or quarters). 

. Shows your roadmap in terms of what is planned in progress and done (or some version of that). Our 

SaaS product roadmaps, tools and templates

Once you have your roadmap, I suggest you share it with your team, customers & stakeholders to keep them in the loop on your progress. Your customers will love to see that you are listening to their feedback and you can close the customer feedback loop by 

letting them know when you launch something that they have asked for

Convas can help you gather & prioritize your feedback and keep everyone in the loop with a product roadmap and product update announcements. 

As you grow and have an increasing amount of feature requests and feedback from your customers, it can be challenging to prioritize your roadmap. Follow a structured process that takes both customer feedback and your strategic priorities into consideration, and use a product prioritization framework to identify your top priorities.

How to prioritize your product roadmap

Users can now upvote feedback without registering an account.

Company users can enable/disable anonymous voting on a feedback board level.

Go to Settings / Boards and click on the Board that you want to edit.

Company users can now discuss ideas and feedback posts privately within the team.

Logged in company users see internal comments on each feedback post, right next to the external comments.

Company users can now review posts, and accept or reject them, before they are published to the feedback page. Enable this feature if you want to control which posts are shown on your feedback page.

Go to Settings / Company to enable post moderation.

When post moderation is enabled, you can access your review queue from the admin navigation. Approve posts to show them on your feedback page.

We hope you like these new features and the new look of the admin view! 

You can now allow your users to vote anonymously, discuss feedback privately with your team, and review feedback posts before they are published. Check out our new features and updated design.

Product update: anonymous voting, internal comments & post moderation

We are happy to announce that you may now share a public roadmap with your customers using Convas. The public product roadmap is an easy way for you to show your customers feedback that is planned, currently being worked on, or recently completed.

We hope that the product roadmap feature will help reduce the number of incoming queries that you and your support team receive from enthusiastic customers. It's a great way to keep your most engaging customers informed and happy, without much extra effort from you.

If you don't know what Convas is read more 

The product roadmap will automatically show all feedback posts that are either Planned, In Progress, or recently Completed. It's that simple. 

Take a look at how our product roadmap looks at 

Please share your feedback on the product feature roadmap with us, any thoughts or concerns are welcome. Just go to our 

Public product roadmap showing customer feedback organized by status

We are happy to announce that you may now share a roadmap with your customers using Convas. The roadmap is an easy way for you to show your customers feedback that is planned, currently being worked on, or recently completed.

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Product roadmap - New feature on Convas

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Feedback on the roadmap feature

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How to prioritize your product roadmap

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