Determining where to spend finite resources of time, capital, and talent—is some of the most important and impactful work you can do for your business. For many product companies, this work often manifests in the form of the product roadmap. While the vision sets the company’s long-term aspirations, the product roadmap outlines the how, when, and what will bring that vision to life.
To bring more objectivity to our process, we ran a detailed analysis using the Sean Ellis question. Inspired by Rahul Vohra at Superhuman (via a First Round Capital article), we deployed a 3-question survey that we asked our users:
1. How would you feel if you could no longer use Prehab?
2. What is the main benefit you receive from Prehab?
3. How can we improve Prehab for you?
This provided us with an objective Sean Ellis score of 56% (a number we were thrilled to see!). However, the real value came from analyzing the nearly 1,000 responses to the second and third questions.
First, we identified the core aspects of our product that our most loyal users raved about—specifically from the cohort of users who answered they would be “very disappointed” if they could no longer use Prehab. Analyzing their responses to the question “What is the main benefit you receive from Prehab?” allowed us to pinpoint the benefits that overwhelmingly drove joy, happiness, and value for these users.
With this information, we adjusted our product roadmap to double down on optimizations and feature improvements tied to these core themes. The goal here is to continue investing resources into the features our core users love—helping us solidify our position in the market and increase loyalty among our most enthusiastic users.
But pleasing our core users isn’t enough to reach our broader goals. We also wanted to address the needs of our “on-the-fence” users. To do this, we analyzed the cohort of users who answered they would be “somewhat disappointed” if they could no longer use Prehab. Among this group, we filtered further to identify users who derived the same benefits as our core users. From there, we analyzed their responses to the question “How can we improve Prehab for you?” to uncover the key areas of improvement that could help us win over this segment.
Armed with these insights, we adjusted our roadmap again—evaluating the effort and hypothesized impact of each proposed feature. We carefully balanced optimizing our product’s core unique value propositions while also addressing the concerns of our “somewhat disappointed” users.
The result? A compelling product roadmap that aligns our team, focuses our resources, and supports our ambitious growth targets.
How do you prioritize projects and allocate your finite resources of time, capital, and talent? I believe it’s as much art as it is science. I’d love to hear your thoughts!!
