Hello Jason! 👋

We have a pretty nuanced perspective on roadmap management.

In my experience, startups tend towards one of two extremes. Some teams, especially those which are driven by vision, tend to constantly double down on what users love. Whereas some teams, especially those which are driven by data, tend to systematically address user issues.

In practice, I believe that you need to keep vision and data in very careful balance. If you only double down on what users love, then you will never grow beyond your initial niche. If you only address user issues, then your competition will likely overtake you.

Each quarter we plan to spend 50% of our time doubling down on vision, and 50% of our time addressing user issues.

The question then comes this: how do you prioritize within each stream?

Doubling down on vision is an art. This is where you get to exercise your "product instinct". Talk to your users, lean into your intuition, and figure out the most impactful ways to give people more of what they crave.

Addressing user feedback is much more straightforward. We use a very simple cost-impact analysis: we label each potential project as low/medium/high cost, and similarly low/medium/high impact. We then pick the lowest hanging fruit; projects which are both low cost as well as high impact!

I cover this part of our roadmap philosophy in the second part of this article: How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit