Navigating which product features to build next is one of the most challenging yet impactful decisions SaaS entrepreneurs and developers face. Between market demands, customer requests, technical constraints, and strategic priorities, the build-or-not-to-build question remains a complex riddle for companies at all stages.

Should you build whatever customers ask for or stay laser-focused on a core product vision? Can you meet every need or risk diluting your offering? How do you identify the features really moving the needle versus “nice-to-haves”?

In this article, we’ll explore key lessons on building a high-growth product roadmap. You’ll discover:

  • How adhering to a clear product vision guides sustainable innovation
  • Methods for capturing, tracking, and learning from feature requests
  • A framework for evaluating feature build priorities and ROI
  • The importance of considering long-term feature maintenance costs
  • Why saying no gets easier as your market and customer base matures
  • Techniques to deeply understand user needs before committing to custom builds

Whether you're an early-stage startup plotting initial features or a scaleup managing an extensive roadmap, applying these learnings will assist your team in staying focused on the capabilities with the highest impact.

Ready to unlock a more streamlined yet strategic approach to product development? Let’s dive in.

Key Takeaways

  • Have a clear product vision and roadmap to guide what you build rather than reactively building every customer request. Stay true to this vision over time.
  • Log all feature requests to spot opportunities and trends instead of ignoring them. Review periodically to identify top requests.
  • Be selective when deciding what to build next. Consider factors like customer demand, strategic alignment, required resources, and revenue potential.
  • Evaluate potential feature complexity under the hood and long-term maintenance costs, not just user benefit.
  • Avoid trying to be everything to everyone early on before understanding your market. Saying no gets easier over time.
  • Thoroughly understand customer motivation for requests to assess if third-party integrations address the need so custom builds aren't required.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize: Defining Your Product Vision

As a developer building a new SaaS product, one of the most important things you can do is define a clear, focused product vision from the start. This vision should act as your true north, guiding each decision you make around product development and feature prioritization.

The Dangers of Building Whatever Customers Request

It's tempting, especially early on, to simply build whatever features your initial customers ask for. You want traction, revenue, and to make them happy, right?

However, this reactive approach can quickly lead you astray, bloating your product with features only a tiny subset of users want. Before you know it, you’ve got a complex, cluttered product lacking any coherent identity.

This reactive approach rarely leads to sustainable product-market fit.

Align Development to Your Product Vision

The most successful SaaS products begin with a crisp, clearly-defined vision from their founding developer or product leader. This vision crystallizes who the product is for, the key problems it will solve, and what goals or outcomes it will help users accomplish.

With this North Star in view, you can then evaluate each potential feature addition against your vision, roadmap, and priorities.

Ask yourself questions like:

  • Does this align with our target customer and their needs?
  • Will 80%+ of our customer base find value in this feature?
  • Is this the right time to build this based on our roadmap?
  • Does this distract or detract from our core value proposition?

Run each request through this vision filter before deciding what to build next. Stay focused on the key problems you set out to solve in a simple yet complete way.

Your Vision Gets Clearer with Traction

Early on, your vision may lack clarity as you work to find product-market fit. As you gain more customers and traction, you’ll develop a clearer picture of who your real target customers are and what they need.

Regularly revisit your vision as you learn. But avoid drastically changing course or bloating scope without good reason.

Evolving your offering over time to better meet market needs is expected. But fight to stay true to the core essence of what makes your product uniquely helpful, as opposed to chasing every customer request.

Your product vision is your compass pointing to sustainable growth and value creation.

Tap into Your Idea Repository: Logging and Reviewing Feature Requests

As a SaaS developer, you likely receive no shortage of feature requests from enthusiastic customers and prospects. While you can't build them all, logging these requests provides invaluable insight you shouldn't ignore.

The Pitfalls of Disregarding Inbound Requests

It's easy to brush off an odd customer request as too niche or not aligned with your roadmap. However, what seems like an one-off ask today may signal rising demand from a segment of your market.

If you ignore and discard all feature requests, you miss out on crucial market feedback. You may overlook opportunities to serve emerging needs and expand your appeal.

Log All Requests in a Central Repository

To avoid this, have a system to log all inbound feature requests, whether submitted through in-app forms, support tickets, sales calls, or other channels. Use a spreadsheet, feature voting software, or simple to-do list to track these.

Centralizing requests allows you spot trends and patterns you may otherwise miss.

Make sure to log useful context, including:

  • Date received
  • Customer name/details
  • The specific feature ask
  • Use cases or problems it solves

Over time, aggregate data on your logged entries to see which requests bubble up most frequently.

Regularly Review and Identify Top Requests

Set time at least quarterly to thoroughly review your aggregated feature requests. Look for rising requests that indicate market interest in a new capability.

As you review, ask questions like:

  • Have multiple customers asked for this now? Is interest growing?
  • Would this expand our appeal to new customer segments?
  • Does this align with our roadmap or long-term product vision?

Use this regular review to identify top feature requests to consider for your next development sprint or product roadmap.

Don't build everything customers ask for, but leverage their input to enhance and evolve your offering. Target addressing rising needs and opportunities without deviating from your core value proposition.

Choosy Developers Choose Wisely: Prioritizing Feature Builds

You'll never have enough development resources to build every feature customers request. As a small SaaS dev team, you must stay disciplined in evaluating requests and prioritizing builds.

Aim to work on features delivering the most value based on your product vision, customer needs, and development capacity.

Key Factors to Consider When Prioritizing

Before deciding whether to build a requested capability, weigh several key factors including:

Customer Demand

  • How many customers have requested this?
  • How vocal is the demand? Is it a passionate pain point?
  • Will this attract new customers as well as pleasing existing ones?

Strategic Value

  • Does this align with our product vision and philosophy?
  • Will this distract or enhance our unique value proposition?

Development Resources

  • How complex will this feature be to build and maintain?
  • Do we have the skills in-house or need to hire for this?

Revenue Potential

  • Will this allow us to charge more per customer?
  • Can this feature become a new paid add-on module?

Find the Highest ROI Builds for Your Stage

Early on, prioritize by customer demand and ease of build. Target quick wins proving value to users fast.

Later, shift focus to more complex builds tied to charging more or attracting higher-value customers.

However, only build features closely aligned with your long-term product vision. Avoid short-term revenue grabs diverging from the core problems you exist to solve.

Analyze all opportunities through the lenses of customer needs, development reality, and strategic vision. Identify the highest potential ROI features to build next.

Stay focused on builds delivering compelling value, not just checking boxes on a long wish list.

Avoid Getting Entangled: Assessing Feature Complexity and Maintenance

With your SaaS product's backlog bursting with feature requests, each potential addition can seem small on its own. However, over time too many complex capabilities bog down development velocity and overhead.

Carefully evaluate prospective features to avoid unchecked complexity and maintenance costs down the road. Always consider long-term upkeep needs alongside user value.

Look Below the Surface Before Building

The surface benefit of a requested capability may appear straightforward to deliver. For example, customers ask to integrate a new third-party API or add a notification feed.

However, peer below the superficial UI code to examine what's really involved thanks to:

  • Additional data structures - Will entirely new database tables and schemas be required?
  • Ongoing sync procedures - Is persistent syncing needed to keep external integrations updated?
  • Infrastructure additions - Will this require new cloud services, caching layers, or microservices?
  • Testing complexity - How much effort is needed to test all possible use cases and failures?

Carefully analyze the fuller technical picture before deciding to build. Avoid features requiring significant new architectures solely for niche use cases.

How Much Ongoing Overhead?

Also evaluate ongoing maintenance commitments required after launching the feature:

  • Customer support - Will this significantly increase complexity answering user questions?
  • Integration maintenance - Is this touching external systems which may break or change APIs?
  • Bug monitoring - Does this introduce new possible failure points to continually test?

Account for post-launch overhead in go/no-go decisions. Monitor tech debt accumulations that eventually require refactoring sprints.

Keep complexity in check to avoid a convoluted codebase impossible to enhance and slow to improve. Target features delivering maximal value for minimal maintenance costs.

Avoid a Crisis of Identity: Know When to Say No

In your quest to please every early adopter, your product vision can become fatally diluted. Offering a disjointed array of niche capabilities leads to bloat, not sustainable growth.

Recognize the inherent dangers in overextending capabilities too soon before you truly understand your core market. Get comfortable wielding “no” early on.

Please Everyone and You Please No One

When launching a new SaaS app, it’s tempting to cater to each individual early customer. Making quick tweaks here and there feels helpful.

However, if you build one-off solutions for every narrow use case, you end up with a fragmented Franken-product no single customer loves.

Trying to be everything to everyone often results in pleasing no one.

Gain Clarity as Your Customer Base Grows

As you gain more users, patterns emerge revealing primary needs and opportunities. Core jobs to be done become clearer over time.

Use this understanding to refine scope around what your product uniquely excels at. Doubling down on excelling for a tighter audience drives organic growth.

Revisit previous “no’s” as market clarity increases. But rarely build something early on just because one customer asked.

Set Expectations Early On

Tempering expectations upfront avoids some difficult conversations down the line after launch.

Be transparent about your product vision guiding what will and won’t get built. Highlight alternative solutions for other needs in your space.

Explain no decision that, while you want to solve X need, doing so would dilute your focus on excelling at your core strengths. Customers will understand.

Don’t try to prematurely boil the ocean. Stay focused on your vision to win market-leading share over time.

Double-click to Deeply Understand Needs

When customers request substantial new capabilities, don't immediately jump to custom development. First, thoroughly understand their motivation and validate if it aligns with your vision.

Ask probing questions to determine if their root need is better addressed through integrating with existing tools versus building from scratch.

Dig Into the Impetus of Feature Requests

It's tempting to take feature requests at face value without deeper examination. However, what customers ask for and what they actually need may differ.

When you receive a seemingly sensible capability request, schedule calls to uncover:

  • What exact problem does this solve for you?
  • How are you solving this problem today?
  • Why does your current solution fall short?
  • How would this proposed feature fit into your workflows?

Document use cases and specific benefits requested. Test assumptions on importance and usage levels.

Gaining clarity on the root need behind requests informs you if custom builds are appropriate or overkill.

Survey the Integrations Landscape

Many needs customers have can be solved by integrating established, best-of-breed point solutions already on the market.

Analyze if platforms like Zapier, Airtable, Calendly, or others can address the core requirement through automation and connectivity.

Plugging into existing tools is often faster and cheaper than custom builds. And it allows you to stay focused on excelling at your specific value proposition.

Before committing development resources based on customer asks, take time to truly unpack their needs and survey the marketplace. Determine if you are the best party to build the solution. Say no when existing integrations sufficiently address the requirement.

References