Feature Prioritization with Customer Data

Roadmap prioritization is one of the hardest parts of product management, and most teams do it badly.

The typical prioritization meeting looks like this: stakeholders advocate for their preferred features, someone references a few recent customer conversations, the loudest voice wins, and the team commits to a roadmap that may or may not address what customers actually need.

Even teams that try to be data-driven struggle. Feature requests exist across dozens of channels — support tickets, sales notes, survey responses, community forums, customer calls — but they're not aggregated or quantified. A PM might know that "some customers want dark mode" but can't answer basic questions like: How many customers have asked for this? What's the total ARR of customers requesting it? Are these enterprise or SMB customers? How does this compare to other requests? What would we lose if we don't build it?

Without this data, prioritization frameworks like RICE become theater. Teams assign arbitrary "impact" scores based on intuition, then use math to make gut decisions look scientific.