Hi Shruti -that’s such a tough one! I think that, at the beginning we were so delighted and overwhelmed by huge growth and interest in our tool, we definitely just took on more than we could deal with.
Our product development was a bit all over the place, we had too many settings, tabs, features and it was driving us crazy. The free tool had complicated features we couldn’t support, the paying customers wanted other features we didn’t have time to develop because we were too busy building out capacity overall - nightmare!
We did lots of things to figure this out - but some exercises that stop out were:
- Identify what group of customers are most successful (and profitable for you) in using your tool, So for us, we are focussing on businesses who have large teams who need to co-ordinate meeting with their customers (like sales / customer success and so on) and other related functions like recruitment and ux research -all B2B type stuff where scheduling needs to be high quality, secure and customisable.
If you have a group of customers in mind you are building for, suddenly a huge number of things you ‘could’ do fade away as you just know they are not relevant. If you are successful at the strategcy the good news is you can come back to those other customers later in an expansion mode.
- When we re-jigged our pricing and our tiers, which we have sone several times and even changes our pricing model altogether, we sat down and whiteboarded all our features - just took a step back and looked at where everything currently sat, what it was doing, and how we re-jigged.
When we did this a 3rd time we knew that different pricing for different features gets increasingly complex to support legacy plans etc). So we switched to 1 simple price-per linked calendar and then you get all the features upgraded with it. It’s served us well and massively cut down on complexity.
All off this has helped, but we’re still learning - a quick plug for Bruce McCarthy as we did a product roadmap masterclass recently with him and I loved his simple walkthrough on how to prioritise and manage a roadmap as well as prune your backlog.