Feature gaps and roadmap planning
This is one of the hardest things I've had to learn as a founder. You set out to build products to help people and solve their problems.
You cobble together a MVP, emphasis on the minimum, and launch it to a bunch of users
If you're lucky, you get a ton of demand.
How do you decide what to build next? How do you decide to focus on customer onboarding vs fixing bugs vs launching new features to unlock more revenue?
If your goal is to make people happy (or "make something people want" per YC's motto), the list of things people want is really really long
. . .
After countless calls with a tinge of embarrassment ("sorry we can't do this yet")
We've come up with a really simple formula:
- We keep track of every feature request we get from customers
- We try to keep a mental model / vision of what we want Skyvern to look like long-term
Based on the above, we try to stack rank projects based on these 4 factors:
- Amount of new business unlocked: $$$$
- How much work is it to get out an MVP? # of days
- What's our conviction that this will change the game? Score of 1-5
- Will this delight our existing customers? Score of 😍 to 😍😍😍😍😍
Look familiar? It's a lightly adapted version of the RICE framework for prioritization :)
We then take the projects and stack rank them based on what's important to the business right now.
Here's what it looks like for "Allowing our customers to build workflows to chain automations together":
- Amount of new business unlocked: $$$$
- How much work is it to get it out: >15 days
- Whats our conviction that this will change the game?: 5
- Will this delight our existing customers? 😍😍
Contrast that to "Allow our customers to cancel tasks"
- Amount of new business unlocked: $
- How much work is it to get out: <2 hours
- What's our conviction this will change the game: 1
- Will this delight our existing customers? 😍😍😍😍😍
We ended up shipping #2 before #1 because delighting customers is our #1 priority right now 😄
