Hi-tech companies grow … they get a healthy, active customer base that loves to contribute. The requests for improvements flow in and the attitude for the first few years is “whatever the customers want” and “whatever to make the sale”. At some point in this growth, the challenge becomes satisfying existing customers, expanding into new markets or deeper into existing markets and innovating the product.

So, what’s the problem? In order to make all fronts happy, you need to balance all three – or least understand that you consciously need to examine all three to determine their relative importance to your company. With a finite set of development, qa, and documentation resources, that in all but the rarest cases, can not do everything, this becomes a real challenge.

Here are the potential results of not addressing this challenge.

• Customer dis-satisfaction – unhappy customers question whether they should renew their maintenance and support contract – jeopardizing a revenue stream that accounts for 18% to 28% of the initial license sale or, in the case of a SaaS model, the actual contract may be in jeopardy.
• Inability to expand markets – expanding into new markets or expanding within current markets means  more potential new name accounts – failing here means not getting the revenue.
• Unable to innovate at the technology level – products that have been around for a few years, need updating to leverage an updated infra-structure or need improvements to make that next big innovative leap in the market – lagging behind invites new competitors to jump in.

Each of these generate innovative ideas (features) or they expose gaps in the product that need to be filled. Business-driven product management is about deciding what to include in the product to best meet balancing the investment in Customer Satisfaction, Market Expansion and Technology Innovation.

A weighted set of business objectives reflects the goals of the business for the near, medium and/or far terms. In other words, it determines the priority of your investment. Are you going to invest more in making customers happy (or happier)? Or is investing in expanding into another market more important. Assessing the feature requests against these objectives will determine the relative importance of these requests and thus your product releases will match your corporate goals. There’s no point in investing in features that do not move you closer to your objectives!