How to use business goals to prioritise your roadmap

I often hear businesses say that they are using business goals to prioritise their roadmap. This is precisely the right thing to do. But what I see them actually doing is using that single business goal metric to do the prioritisation.

What if one of the business goals was “increase conversion of trial users to paying customers”? I see these businesses have a prioritisation mechanism only based around “will this increase our trial conversion rate?”. It’s not enough.

If you don’t have KPIs and metrics around the whole business goal, you can’t possibly prioritise the breadth of features and functionality in your product that contribute to it

What this misses are the nuances of measuring and understanding the trial conversion journey as a whole. If you don’t have KPIs and metrics around the whole conversion journey, you can’t possibly prioritise the breadth of features and functionality in your product that contribute to the increasing conversion. A full set of user journey KPIs enables you to do this.

For example:

• Number of new users visiting the site
• Number of users signing up for the trial
• Number of trial users using the app to do [X] and [Y]
• Number of trial customers that convert to paying customers
• Number of paying customers that are still paying after x months

A complete list of such KPIs helps you prioritise every aspect of trial conversion. They enable you to focus on how and where in the product you can positively impact trial conversions, not just the fact that you have or haven’t increased trial conversions.

This enables you to, for example, test the impact of:

• The content of the email or whatever that takes people to your site in the first place
• The UX of the landing page that gets trial uses to signup
• What trial users do or don’t do, or struggle with, during the trial
• The process of signing up as a paying customer having been a trial user
• And so on

It’s a fantastic way of keeping everybody focused. You just point at the KPIs and ask, is this going to move the dial or test moving the dial on those metrics, and thus the business goal?

As you can see, it’s not just about the headline goal. It’s about every aspect of your product that impacts moving the goal forwards.

I run product management workshops to help align this sort of thing with validated product value propositions. Get in touch.