Bringing customer evidence into the roadmap

A new B2B SaaS product was moving towards launch, but the team had not yet spoken directly with the retailers who would become its customers. With the roadmap still taking shape, there was an opportunity to bring customer evidence into the process while it could still influence product decisions.

I designed a rapid study to understand how retailers worked today, where their biggest challenges lay, and what they would actually need from the product.

Getting breadth across a complex customer base

Retailers vary considerably in size, structure, digital maturity and ways of working. I wanted enough breadth to understand which needs were consistent and which were specific to particular types of retailer.

Over three weeks, I interviewed 40 retailers, exploring their existing workflows, pain points, priorities and operational constraints, as well as their reactions to the proposed product.

Rather than treating individual feature requests as requirements, I looked for the underlying problems and patterns behind them, giving the team a clearer basis for deciding what the product needed to solve.

Turning 40 perspectives into product priorities

The challenge was making a large volume of qualitative evidence useful quickly.

I synthesised the research around recurring customer needs and the differences that mattered most between retailers, then translated those findings into clear implications for the product roadmap.

For example, a home improvement retailer wanted more dynamic content. I probed further into what drove relevance for their shoppers, and uncovered weather as an important factor - this led to a new roadmap item for weather-responsive content.

What changed

40 prospective customers brought into product development
The team gained direct evidence from retailers before the product went live.

A clearer view of what mattered most
Patterns across retailers helped distinguish recurring customer needs from individual requests and preferences.

Research translated into roadmap decisions
The findings informed product priorities and helped the team determine what needed attention ahead of launch.