Your audience will dictate your product roadmap if you listen. Porterfield's evolution was a direct response to customer feedback. They finished her webinar course and asked what to sell. They finished her product course and asked how to market it. The path to her flagship product was paved with their questions.
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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.
The trust you've built with current customers allows them to share raw industry insights and market intelligence that prospects won't. This feedback loop is invaluable for product development, competitive strategy, and identifying new opportunities.
In the pre-product-market fit stage (the first ~20 deals), the sales leader's primary role is not just closing revenue, but acting as a product manager. They must be in every meeting to gather objections, find pockets of value, and translate raw market feedback into actionable insights for the engineering team.
Instead of waiting for features to build a story, develop the compelling narrative the market needs to hear first. This story then guides the launch strategy and influences the roadmap, with product functionality serving as supporting proof points, not the centerpiece.
You've achieved product-market fit when the market pulls you forward, characterized by growth driven entirely by organic referrals. If your customers are so passionate that they do the selling for you, you've moved beyond just a good idea.
Instead of building an automated evergreen product from scratch, launch it live first. This strategy allows you to learn from your audience in real time, test messaging, and handle objections. Once the process is dialed in and proven, you can package that successful system into a repeatable evergreen offer.
A common marketing mistake is being product-centric. Instead of selling a pre-packaged product, first identify the customer's primary business challenge. Then, frame and adapt your offering as the specific solution to that problem, ensuring immediate relevance and value.
