Turning customer feedback into a product strategy

Talentware built on customer feedback. Said like that it sounds like a virtue, which is exactly why the problem stays invisible for so long. Everything gets built and nothing gets chosen. The roadmap is written by whatever request came in last, and at the end of the quarter nobody can say which of the things released actually mattered.

There were no design standards and no way to test an idea before releasing it, so every feature was a bet whose outcome was discovered on the market, where correcting costs the most. The bottleneck was not the ability to design screens. It was the absence of a criterion for deciding which ones to design.

So that is what we worked on, together and in the order it was needed. First, who decides what, on what criterion and at what point. Then a product strategy the roadmap could hold on to when the next request came in, so it could say no without refusing on instinct. Then a design system, so that what had been rebuilt every time could be reused.

During the engagement the customer base multiplied several times over. Design did not bring those customers in. Sales did. The point is that the product carried them without being rewritten, and that the features released in the meantime were chosen rather than absorbed. That is exactly what we had built for.