How do you solicit and incorporate stakeholder feedback into your product roadmap revisions?

1 Identify your key stakeholders

Stakeholders are anyone who has an interest or influence in your product, such as customers, users, executives, team members, and partners. Not all stakeholders are equally important or relevant for your product roadmap revisions. It's important to identify your key stakeholders, who are the ones who can provide valuable input, support, or resources for your product goals and decisions. You can use criteria such as impact, urgency, authority, and alignment to prioritize and segment your key stakeholders. You can create a stakeholder map that plots them on a matrix of interest and power.

3 Analyze and prioritize feedback

After collecting feedback from your key stakeholders, analyze and prioritize it. Analyzing feedback means finding patterns, themes, and insights that can help you improve your product roadmap. You can use tools such as affinity diagrams, SWOT analysis, or feedback matrices to organize and categorize feedback. Prioritizing feedback means deciding which feedback is most relevant, important, and feasible for your product roadmap revisions. You can use frameworks such as the Kano model, the RICE score, or the MoSCoW method to rank and compare feedback based on factors such as customer satisfaction, impact, effort, and urgency.

4 Incorporate feedback into your product roadmap revisions

After analyzing and prioritizing feedback from your key stakeholders, incorporate it into your product roadmap revisions. You can use tools such as roadmap software, templates, or diagrams to update and communicate your product roadmap revisions. Explain the rationale behind your changes, and how they address the feedback you received. Make sure to acknowledge and thank your key stakeholders for their feedback, and invite them to share more feedback in the future.

5 Validate and iterate your product roadmap revisions

After incorporating feedback into your product roadmap revisions, validate and iterate them. Validating your product roadmap revisions means testing and measuring how they perform and deliver value to your key stakeholders. You can use methods such as prototypes, MVPs, experiments, or metrics to validate your product roadmap revisions. Iterating your product roadmap revisions means making further changes based on the results of your validation, and repeating the process until you achieve your desired outcomes. You should also keep collecting and incorporating feedback from your key stakeholders throughout the validation and iteration process, and keep them informed and engaged with your product roadmap revisions.

6 Benefits of soliciting and incorporating stakeholder feedback

Soliciting and incorporating stakeholder feedback into your product roadmap can help build trust and rapport with key stakeholders by showing that their input is valued. Furthermore, it can provide insights and perspectives to identify and solve customer problems, as well as reduce risks and uncertainties in product decisions. It can also improve collaboration and communication among the product team and other stakeholders, while also enhancing product performance and value. Ultimately, it can help achieve the product vision and goals.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?