Don't just collect feedback from all users equally. Identify and listen closely to the few "visionary users" who intuitively grasp what's next. Their detailed feedback can serve as a powerful validation and even a blueprint for your long-term product strategy.

In early stages, the key to an effective product roadmap is ruthlessly prioritizing based on the severity of customer pain. A feature is only worth building if it solves an acute, costly problem. If customers aren't in enough pain to spend money and time, the idea is irrelevant for near-term revenue generation.

Allocate 50% of your roadmap to core functionality ('low delight'), 40% to features blending function and emotion ('deep delight'), and 10% to purely joyful features ('surface delight'). This model ensures you deliver core value while strategically investing in a superior user experience.

Customers request specific features (supply), but this masks the true demand—the underlying problem they're trying to solve. Focusing on the 'why' behind the request leads to simpler, more effective solutions, like building a digest email instead of a complex 'advanced settings' page.

Avoid the trap of building features for a single customer, which grinds products to a halt. When a high-stakes customer makes a specific request, the goal is to reframe and build it in a way that benefits the entire customer base, turning a one-off demand into a strategic win-win.

A simple but powerful framework for any product initiative requires answering four questions: 1) What is it? 2) Why does it matter (financially)? 3) How much will it cost (including hiring and ops)? 4) When do I get it? This forces teams to think through the full business impact, not just the user value.