10 Years. 10 Insights.
Insight 4: Build a Market-Driven Product Roadmap
This is the fourth post in a ten-part series marking Inkberry’s 10th anniversary. Each post covers an insight drawn from a decade of working with B2B founders and leadership teams on growth strategy.
I know what you’re thinking: “Thanks Captain Obvious, of course we build our roadmap based on what the market needs.” And every product team thinks that’s what they’re doing but, in practice, this is one of the harder disciplines to get right. In my experience, most roadmaps are shaped far more by the loudest voices than by genuine market listening. The gap between intention and practice here is wider than most teams recognize.
There are three sources of input that tend to get the most attention.
The three loudest voices:
Your most vocal customers. Talking to your customers is essential, but the customers you hear from most often may not represent the majority of your customer base. Their needs are real, but they’re not the whole picture.
Your tech team’s interests. Engineers are drawn to interesting problems, and that’s a good thing. But “interesting to solve” and “valuable to the market” aren’t always the same question, and product roadmaps built primarily around what the team finds compelling can drift away from what customers actually need.
What your salespeople are asking for. This one is tricky, because salespeople are talking to customers and that input matters. But salespeople are often focused on what will close the next deal, which is important information but only one input among many.
The antidote to all three is building a genuine market listening practice and giving your product managers the time and space to do it.
Building a market-driven roadmap means listening beyond the obvious sources:
Talk to your quiet customers. The ones who are getting a lot done without asking for much often have valuable perspectives that never surface in your loudest conversations.
Talk to customers who have left. Understanding why they went elsewhere is some of the most valuable intelligence you can gather,
Talk to prospects where you lost the deal. These conversations, conducted by a product manager rather than a salesperson, often surface insights that never make it into a sales debrief.
Get out of the office. Pragmatic Institute has a phrase I’ve always found useful: NIHITO. Nothing Important Happens In The Office. It’s a good reminder of where real market intelligence comes from, and how easy it is to fool yourself into thinking internal conversations are comprehensive.
Use research and surveys, but don’t rely on them alone. They can’t be limited to your existing customer base, and the people who respond, while important, are self-selected. At some point, there’s no substitute for getting out and seeing firsthand how your products are being used and what problems your customers are actually trying to solve.
A product roadmap built on real market listening looks different from one built on the loudest voices in the room. It’s harder to build, but it leads to better decisions and fewer costly course corrections down the road.
If building a market-driven product strategy is something you’re working on, I’d love to talk.