In celebration of the launch of our customer-facing Product Roadmap, I sat down with Mariia Starikova, our Head of Product, to learn a little more about the Felix Product Roadmap and why we’re now sharing our plans with customers.
Kristy: Thanks for your time today, Mariia. First up, can you tell me more about what a Product Roadmap is?
Mariia: Sure – a Product Roadmap illustrates a company’s vision and direction of a product over time. It takes into consideration short-term and long-term goals to outline the development of a product and the reasoning behind it. I’ve seen and experimented myself with different forms and types of roadmaps, from traditional timeline and feature-oriented Gantt charts to outcome-based roadmaps, which set a timeline of objectives/outcomes that we aim to achieve in that time – based on quarters, yearly, time horizons or something else - depending on what works best for that company and their goals. Over time, as many Product Managers do, I concluded that regardless of how the roadmap is laid out, it must communicate two critical components – a vision of what we plan to achieve and why it is important.
Kristy: So, we’ve always had a Product Roadmap?
Mariia: Yes! We’ve always had an internal Product Roadmap that the Product Team uses to guide the continuous development and evolution of Felix. For a long time now, we have made our roadmap accessible to internal teams, because we have always believed that a clear roadmap has the power to unite the whole company behind our vision and create a common sense of direction.
Kristy: If we’ve always had an internal Product Roadmap, why have we decided to share our Product Roadmap with customers?
Mariia: There are lots of reasons for that. The main part of the story is that, as a business, Felix strives to develop and deliver the best possible solution and provide the best possible value to our customers to help them build a better way. We firmly believe that the way to achieve that - is by building the product together.
- Hit the mark.
We aim to continuously engage with our customers when designing new solutions and firming up the direction, because we want to ensure that the final product meets our user needs and, hopefully, goes beyond that. Whether that’s one-on-one interviews that our Product Managers and Designers conduct, protype tests or more quantitative research, such as surveys, – listening to our customers is critical to how we develop product. A customer-facing Product Roadmap is yet another touchpoint that allows us to validate our approach directly with our users.
- Discover new ideas and validate our approach rapidly.
When our users participate in the evolution of Felix, understand our roadmap and vision, they can provide valuable feedback early – they might highlight ideas we haven’t considered, confirm that the direction we’ve chosen is the right approach or even better – highlight that some of the ideas are not quite right. There is nothing worse for the product team than launching the product that does not hit the mark and drive the right outcomes for our users. Ability to move quickly, iterate on ideas and validate them as early as possible – in other words, speed of discovery, is another critical part of our process.
- Build a community.
By engaging with our roadmap and providing input, our customers can ensure their voices are heard by being part of the product development process. And it’s exciting for our customer when they see that an idea they have suggested has been brought to life – they feel a lot more involved and engaged as they feel like they are co-creators and celebrate with us when their ideas have been launched. When we progress opportunities in the roadmap, our team will leave comments for the users who have provided feedback or voted on them. This will trigger an automatic notification to users, helping them stay in the loop and know that their idea is being actioned.
- Help customers prepare for change and keep informed.
Finally, we’ve decided to share our Product Roadmap to help our customers prepare for change. In the past, when we would build and release features, customers wouldn’t know in advance unless we had a clear line of communication with them through our Customer Success team or customer emails. Our customers are large organisations that often need some time to adjust processes, we respect that, and we believe that component of preparing for change is essential.
Kristy: Can you tell me more about how Felix customers can engage and interact with our Product Roadmap?
Mariia: The main thing we would love from customers is for them to give us feedback, whether that’s voting or commenting on the cards seen in the Product Roadmap or adding a completely new idea. Often, we would leave questions and prompts for users around ideas we are considering, which are usually based on some of our initial research. By reading those questions and providing insights, our customers can really help us rule out or confirm ideas and designs faster.
Our customers can access the Product Roadmap from within Felix, and they will see three tabs:
Coming next which are the opportunities we are actively working on, allowing customers to see what’s coming next for Felix. These are features in development or in final stages of specification with our Product Team. We strongly encourage our customers to leave their feedback here; we always want to hear their thoughts, even if we have already started.
Considering – feedback wanted which are the ideas we are exploring. These are opportunities that are in different stages of the discovery and design process, and customer input here is most critical as it will help us prioritise work and shape these features in Felix.
Launched is where you can see what features we’ve launched in the past. Customers can comment, letting us know if they have found it useful or if more improvements are needed.
As I mentioned before, once you leave feedback for a card on the roadmap – you will stay informed on any updates to it automatically. So don’t shy away from leaving comments, even if you just want to stay up to date.
Kristy: What happens when a customer provides feedback on the Product Roadmap?
Mariia: The Product Team receives a notification in our inbox. We start each morning by checking if any new feedback has been added and are constantly monitoring new insights throughout the workday. Customers can be assured that by providing feedback through our Product Roadmap, they have a direct line of communication with our Product Team. Their feedback isn’t going into a black box and getting lost. Sometimes, we may reach out to customers based on the feedback for further clarification, because we want to ensure we fully understand them.
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Check out our Product Roadmap
See what we’re working on to continually enhance and evolve Felix. Refer to our Product Roadmap Help page for information on how to access through Felix so you can learn about what’s next for Felix, vote on features, provide feedback or even suggest your own ideas!
