When it comes to creating product roadmaps, product leaders face a plethora of challenges. 

Not only can it be difficult to figure out which features to prioritize, but product leaders can also struggle with engineering dependencies, executive demands, and the need to operate with agility in a market that moves faster every day.

Suffice it to say that this is a tall order—one that’s even harder without the right tools in place.

The good news is that there’s a simple fix: with product analytics powering the operation, creating impactful product roadmaps is a breeze. When you let user behavior inform your roadmap, it’s much easier to prioritize features you know with certainty your users will be excited over. This, in turn, improves product experiences, increases customer retention, and enables you to supercharge your product-led growth efforts.

Are you ready to learn more about how you can use product analytics to craft your product roadmap and accelerate growth? Let’s go!

Why is your product roadmap important?

Product roadmaps are essential because they let all stakeholders know what they can expect to see in your products in the future. They create a defined, high-level source of truth that outlines future updates and prioritizes upcoming product enhancements.

Building a product roadmap is one thing. Building a defendable roadmap that prioritizes the right features that your users love is another. For this reason, many organizations struggle to balance user feedback and make confident product roadmap decisions.

This is where product analytics can be beneficial. With product analytics guiding the way forward, product leaders can collect the raw data they need to build winning roadmaps.

How do product analytics work? 

At a high level, product analytics give product teams the data they need to determine how users engage with their product and how they feel about the product experience. With product analytics, teams can leverage:

• User feedback to understand exactly what customers think about your products and what they want to see in future versions.
• User journeys show how your users navigate your products, what their favorite and least favorite features are, and where they fall off in usage.
• Feature adoption analysis to determine which features work best, are most used, and are most closely tied to revenue.
• Onboarding or activation analysis to determine how quickly users get up to speed with your product(s) and if there are any hiccups along the way.

In other words, product analytics make it possible to analyze and optimize every corner of your products along with the user experience.

How do you use product analytics to power your product roadmap?

How, specifically, can you use product analytics to power your product roadmap? Let’s take a look.

1. Zoom in on your North Star.

As you begin using product analytics to influence your roadmap, it’s crucial for product teams to align around metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) and determine which of them to prioritize as your north star or the key metric that’s tightly interwoven with company success. For example, you may want to consider using net revenue retention as a place to start.

2. Take advantage of segmentation.

Product analytics enables you to segment your users into different groups and then determine which features are most important to each of them. It allows you to fine-tune data to highlight your ideal customer profile and slice and dice analysis to pinpoint their needs. For example, if software developers are your most important persona, you should absolutely prioritize the features that matter most to them on your roadmap.

3. Track user behaviors.

When you measure user behavior and track changes over time, you can learn more about how your users navigate your products and identify friction points where the user experience leaves much to be desired. Once you understand potential roadblocks, you can begin fixing them (with prioritization based on usage and adoption data) to build a more user-centric product.

4. Test and refine decisions.

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that roadmaps are living, breathing documents. Features that are critically important today might fall out of favor as markets evolve, competitors bring new products to market, and user expectations change. For the best results, treat your roadmap like a work in progress, using product analytics to create closed feedback loops that you can leverage to improve it continuously.

Learn more ways to perfect your product roadmap!

If your goal is accelerating growth and consistently delighting your users, you must create a user-centered product roadmap. And the easiest way to do that is to let product analytics guide your path forward.

To learn more about how to use data to build the best product roadmap possible, download our free guide, “Building Winning Product Experiences.”