What to build first: the hardest question in product strategy

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Roadmapping is one of the most underrated factors in highly regulated industry product success.
The greatest product idea, the most eye-catching marketing plan, and the most well-coded, secure, compliant product will fail if it lacks a thoughtful roadmap.

A roadmap isn’t just a list of features—it’s your strategy for surviving the constraints and still delivering something users care about. For founders, the question isn’t just what to build—it’s what to build first, and what to leave out for now. 

Here’s the thing nobody wants to hear: in a software product, your initial offering—your MVP—probably has 10% or less of the ultimate vision. That’s all you can do well; in many cases, it’s all that can be afforded once you take compliance and security considerations into account. Even if funding is plentiful, it’s likely all that you ought to risk on a first salvo, when you lack footing in the marketplace. Think of your MVP as the first edition of a newspaper—you're not trying to cram in every single topic, just enough to pique the reader’s interest.

That means which 10% you choose (and how you layer in the rest from there) has an enormous impact on your ability to minimize churn and gain momentum.

Why? Because users judge your product on the experience they have at the moment they first open the app, not what your vision is for the final product. This is a risky moment. Twenty-five percent of apps are downloaded and only used once, and 71% churn within the first 90 days (1).

We know a thing or two about churn: statistically speaking, SaaS products we’ve designed and developed have churn rates that are half or less of the industry average.

In order to beat those odds, you need a compelling product—and one that users feel connected to right now—not in the far-off future. Here are some mistakes to avoid if you want to create a successful roadmap.

Mistake #1: Doing it all immediately, with rushed mediocrity

I mentioned in the introduction that your MVP for a software product probably has 10% or less of the ultimate vision. Every time I say that, several of the founders start looking around nervously thinking, “Not my product! I’m getting it all in there. I just pushed my team a little harder.”

Let’s look at what happens when our bold visionary attempts to push this forward all at once. Because no one can bend the laws of productivity, we must assume that the same productivity levels, needs for rest, testing requirements, security requirements, etc., apply to our pusher.

Therefore, a couple of things are going to happen: first, if they are fortunate, their team will be honest about progress, and hence they will find themselves blowing right through deadlines with barely a second glance. Eventually, the visionary will become frustrated and demand that the product just launch with what they have. Because that wasn’t thoughtfully chosen, the result is a hodgepodge of features. They appear in whatever order made sense to build them, leading to a haphazard user experience with no clear value or connection point.

The other possibility is that the product launches—but math being math—the effort that should have gone to 10% of the features is stretched across all 100% of the features, and the experience is about as compelling as watered-down oatmeal. Key flows are clunky. There’s no thought to entry points. Bugs abound. The user immediately feels the disrespect the founder has for their experience, and the product will fail because of the visionary’s hubris and inability to trim the roadmap.

This is what happens if you try to do everything first: missed launches and a mediocre experience.

Mistake #2: Not fixing the hole in your boot

Even when you keep your MVP tight, you can still lose trust fast if the basics aren’t right. Scroll through the one-star reviews on any app, and you’ll see that a majority of user frustration comes from basic functions—like login or password reset. These probably aren’t the core features that the visionary was excited to invest in. They were likely buried in a “Basic Functions” item in the roadmap. And yet they have outsized sway over the experience your users have. It may not be the thing that gets you excited, but it can certainly get your users excited in a negative way if you don’t do it well.

We refer to the mundane but crucial everyday functions of the app as good boots (the analogy being: if you are going to march an army across the continent, you’ve got to give them good boots). When there are problems with the basics (in other words, a hole in your boot) you jeopardize the army’s ability to continue.

Other sources of holes in boots come from unexpected (but common) use cases, user confusion, and third-party issues. All of these can contribute to churn and bad reviews. These are your most pressing enemies, and you must invest in eradicating them.

If you’re saying, “But I don’t want to spend part of my next release on that boring stuff,” you are not alone. Exactly no one likes spending time and money on maintenance, tech debt, and other unsexy aspects of running a product. If you would prefer to spend 100% of your resources on features, you are just like every other founder out there. And just like every other founder, you’ve got to do it anyway.

How much? It depends on how quickly and haphazardly you built in the first place, and how much user feedback you did prior to launch. But on the low end, you probably need to allocate 20%, and on the high end, 40% of each release to iterating on previous features.

This is what happens when you don’t shore up basic features: a decaying experience.

Mistake #3: Releasing a heap o’ features, not a product

After shoring up the basics, the next danger zone isn’t doing too little—it’s trying to do everything, as quickly as possible, with no cohesive story. This particular mistake tends to come from rushing too fast and anxiety about market reception or sales prospects—leading the visionary to misguidedly seek more features to list in the launch emails, hoping that is going to solve the problem.

It can also happen when a later release is driven by only practical concerns (“we can fit this in here”) without regard for how they all fit together. This mistake is the heap o’ features.

This won’t work. I cite this statistic in nearly every talk I give: 95% of decisions are based on emotion (2). Consumers do not buy features; they buy feelings. Specifically, they buy hope, safety, belonging, comfort, confidence, and empowerment (3).

In short, they buy a connection to someone or something that makes them feel better.

If you release a heap o’ features, you will lack a clear path for the user—and without a clear path, they won’t reach that moment of success that makes them feel good.

This is what happens if you pile features in wherever they fit: a confusing experience with no cohesive story.

If you need to make users feel connected to the product right now—but you can only afford 10% of the overall vision in the first release—where do you start?

The good news is that connection isn’t about the length of your feature chart, so it’s very possible to do with a limited feature set. What you want to do is focus on the point where your product meets their lives, and show that you understand it. This is the most important moment in your early product: the 'I see you' moment.” 

Whatever you pick for your ‘I see you’ moment, it should be something that your research indicates resonates with your audience. (If you don’t know how to research this, try firing up some quick pay-per-click ads and seeing what kind of results you get.) Then you want to build the feature set in that release around making good on the inherent promise in that moment.

If your “I see you” moment was around travelers who want to eat healthy but find it challenging while on the road, then your feature set should be sure to deliver on that basic promise.

Don’t worry about affiliate marketing for now. Don’t worry about that cool idea to let them photograph what’s in their fridge to get recipe suggestions. Just focus on that traveler at the moment they are out of town, looking for something healthy to eat.

One last word

By far the most important thing you can do with your roadmap is get the feeling right at every stage.

This is something we spend a lot of time on with our clients: making sure that when people interact with the product, at each stage in the product’s journey, they are walking away feeling better than they started. That’s about the nuts and bolts of accomplishing tasks, but it’s also about messaging, aesthetics, visual cues, and guided paths.

Perhaps most of all, it’s about being willing to take a risk to get a little personal with your users. Show some empathy before you ask them to do the same. Risk-taking is one of your superpowers as a visionary, so raise the flag and lead the charge. Your roadmap isn’t just a plan. It’s your chance to make sure your users feel seen and guided at every stage.

Onward & upward.

Notes:

(1) Kurve. (n.d.). Mobile app download statistics & usage statistics (2024). https://kurve.co.uk/blog/app-downloads-statistics

(2) Stanford Graduate School of Business. (n.d.). More than a feeling: The keys to making the right choice. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/more-feeling-keys-making-right-choice

(3) Sometimes they also buy rage, fear, and superiority, but those tend to be more short-lived in terms of driving behavior, so they’re less effective at powering a product’s success.