De-risking your product roadmap with a customer insights hub

As a product team, you want to surprise and delight your customers with experiences that will keep them coming back for more. The challenge is, your team can’t read your customers’ minds. And relying on guesswork and assumptions to develop product solutions can be problematic.

Research shows that between 25% and 40% of new products fail. Top-performing organizations have an average 62% success rate when developing new products––in lower performers that drops to 45%.

The difference between success and failure could come down to how well product teams understand the people they’re building for. That means deeply understanding their values, wants, needs, and pain points––to develop meaningful and useful experiences for them.

So how can a customer insights hub help? With Dovetail, you can give everyone on the product team fast and easy access to customer insights, at any point in the product development lifecycle. Having a central source of truth for all your company’s customer knowledge, and a frictionless way to quickly analyze what’s known, can offer a number of benefits at the product roadmapping stage, and all the way through development.

Here are just some of the ways a customer insights hub can reduce risk in your product roadmap:

Build confidence in your product roadmap, faster

One of the first goals of any product roadmap should be to validate the assumptions you might have about your customers. Perhaps your product team believes that customer retention will improve after releasing a new app. Or that if you prioritize ease of use over functionality, your prospects will convert at a higher rate.

While assumptions are a necessary part of working in product development, the more impact an assumption has on your strategy, the more important it is to validate or invalidate those assumptions early on in the process.

If you don’t have real customer insights to back up your team’s thinking, the product strategy has a higher risk of failure. Your team could be building the wrong products, solving the wrong problems, or missing key market opportunities.

Dovetail gives your product team a central place for all your insights, and a fast, AI-powered way to analyze everything that’s known about your customers. Using magic search, your team can ask specific questions related to what you’re solving for, and quickly share themes or highlight reels to drive alignment. It’s a great way to quickly validate assumptions, remove risk, and build confidence in what you’re building next.

Spot issues early and reduce churn

If your customers are having difficulties or experiencing bugs, there’s always a chance they’ll start looking elsewhere.

One way to reduce churn is to spot problems early and address them before they bubble up and become a reason to leave. But spotting problems early is complicated when customer feedback flows into your organization every day from endless sources, and finding themes requires sorting through mountains of data points.

How can you spot issues quickly? With Channels from Dovetail, your product team can watch in real time as feedback themes from thousands of data points are automatically generated for you. You can stay ahead of changing trends with weekly summaries, and drill deeper into interesting themes with filters to uncover an even greater understanding of what your customers are thinking and why.

Bringing together data from support tickets, product reviews, It’s a quick and seamless way to turn feedback into insights you can use to align teams around the problems you need to solve to keep customers happy.

Avoid blocking product velocity due to misalignment

A key challenge for product teams is that customer knowledge often ends up siloed, living with a particular team or sitting in a tool that few can access. When customer insights are roadblocked, the teams that need the insights miss out. Importantly, teams end up misaligned on customer needs when insights aren’t shared regularly and fluidly, and the result is friction, tension and oftentimes a slow down in product development velocity. For organizations in a rapidly changing environment, this causes a real risk that the competition will pass you by.

Empowering everyone with customer insights throughout the entire product development cycle helps teams align on decisions faster, drive innovation faster, and feel confident knowing they’re building a product that’s built on real insights.

Innovate at an all-new pace, thanks to automation

Technological advances and the rise of AI are all pushing product development to move faster than ever before. This means there’s increasing demand on product teams to churn out the next solution. That’s where AI-powered tools can really help today’s teams be more productive and bring new products to market faster than ever before.

Dovetail adds AI-powered automation to analyzing data and uncovering customer insights your product team can use to evolve your strategy. Interviewing customers, finding themes, and mobilizing your team around insights used to slow down product teams. Now, having instant access to feedback, and an automated way to uncover trends, means product teams can make data-backed decisions faster, test assumptions along the way, and move faster than they previously could.

Continuous discovery means continuous validation

In a continually evolving landscape, the needs and wants of customers are not static. Instead, they’re increasing and changing as technology does.

A continuous discovery framework, as promoted by Teresa Torres’ book, Continuous Discovery Habits, is commonly used by teams to perform proactive, ongoing, discovery and learning.

This ensures that your team’s assumptions can be tested at every stage of the product journey, not just at the outset. Continuous discovery also ensures your team brings the voice of the customer into your product development process, meaning customer wants, needs, and preferences are embedded in everything your organization produces.

The best teams know they need to extend that learning long after they release new products. With Channels in Dovetail, you can track and identify trends post-release by bringing support tickets, product reviews, and continuous feedback into one place to automatically reveal trends in how customers are responding. Just issued a quick fix on a bug that was driving support tickets up? Dovetail can help you easily see if support ticket volume has declined since release, so you can validate the business impact.

Ready to reduce risk in your product strategy? Discover more about how Dovetail can help your team build roadmap confidence and execute on the things that matter most.