Who owns your WordPress product roadmap?

[00:00:00] Kim Coleman: Hello everyone. We're gonna be starting pretty soon. we're just waiting for our host and cohost to get all online with us. We're excited to talk about product roadmaps.

[00:02:48] Hey, Natalie, welcome. I think you're all set to be able to speak. Oh yeah, go ahead.

[00:02:53] Nathalie Lussier: Yes. Thank you for having me. Oh my gosh it is so great to be here.

[00:03:01] Kim Coleman: We are excited to have you. It sounds slightly muted. I don't know if it's my phone, but, yeah, as close as possible. Do I have to unmute you, Matt? I don't know how that would work. We're muted.

[00:03:13] Nathalie Lussier: Is this any better?

[00:03:14] Kim Coleman: I don't think.

[00:03:15] How do I unmute you?

[00:03:56] Let a few more people come in and then we'll get going. Tell me reaction emoji, I guess if you're hearing us okay.

[00:04:51] It seems like Matt can't unmute. I'm gonna boot you. Maybe remove your cohost and then try to invite you once more.

[00:05:00] Actually, Matt, if you can try, once you're in, listener mode to request to be a speaker that might trick it. We're gonna try that.

[00:06:35] Okay, Matt's gonna try to, reboot the phone and come back in, but I will get started and Natalie's here. So we'll run this show regardless. So cool. Welcome everybody. This is actually the third Twitter space we've done for WP Product Talk. Um. It looks like Natalie's in today, we are talking about the product roadmap.

[00:06:54] Who owns your product roadmap, is it the developers, your marketing team, you know, leadership, your customers? if you have questions, we'll please invite you to use the WP Product Talk hashtag. And then I think we'll get started with a brief intro. Natalie, if you wanna kick off and introduce yourself to our listeners.

[00:07:14] Nathalie Lussier: Yeah. Thank you so much Kimberly, for having me on. Uh, such a great topic. I think we're gonna have a great conversation here. So I'm Natalie Lussier. I'm the founder of Access Ally, which is a WordPress based membership and online course and community solution. And yeah, I've just been, building this company since 2013 and yeah, we've learned a lot.

[00:07:38] I have a degree in software engineering. My husband is our lead developer. And I've learned kind of the theory of some of what we're gonna be talking about today and also, you know, the practice of doing it in a real company. So I think we'll have a lot of cool stuff to talk about.

[00:07:53] Kim Coleman: Perfect. Perfect.

[00:07:55] And, Kim Coleman here. I run a membership plugin called Paid Memberships Pro, also with my spouse, which is super cool. Natalie and I have had to, I think, one big bonding call about the working with your spouse piece in the past yeah, we've been doing this for 12 years and I'm actually at Cabo Press right now.

[00:08:11] So I'm out of the pool, out of those talks and here with you all in my room. Hopefully, with a good enough internet to sustain this.

[00:08:21] Nathalie Lussier: Oh, that's awesome. I'm glad. I'm glad you're enjoying Cabo Press and you're able to kind of sneak away, but I hope you make the most of it too. It sounds awesome.

[00:08:30] Kim Coleman: I agree. I agree.

[00:08:31] It's been good or it's good to have a break because it kind of is an overload of business ideas. So, this is a cool space to be in. So I think we'll start with the talk and then Matt can pick up if he can, within this. So first kind of like talking point we wanna go through is why is this such a significant question, especially for WordPress products, the discussion around the roadmap and, and whether it's public or private and, and ownership of it.

[00:08:56] So, Natalie, do you have any thoughts on kind of the significance of roadmaps?

[00:09:02] Nathalie Lussier: So I feel like when it comes to your roadmap, it's always about kind of balancing what you as the product creator and what your customers want, and also kind of the vision that you have for where you want it to go. And I think it's so important to have a clear, you know, plan for your product roadmap and whether it is something that you publish publicly or that you kind of keep internal because

[00:09:28] that really decides where your business is gonna go and where, you know, whether you're gonna get certain types of customers, whether, you're gonna be a good fit for say, like upmarket or beginners, or however you wanna categorize different types of customers who might be using your product. And I also feel like, especially for WordPress, everyone has sort of different expectations.

[00:09:50] And so if you are publishing that publicly that can help establish those expectations. And people might have an idea of where your product is going that you might not necessarily agree with. So this is where you can kind of set some boundaries a little bit around where you want, you know, to, to really build your product towards.

[00:10:09] So that's, to me, that's kind of where it comes in. I'm sure there's a lot more to it for, for different companies too.

[00:10:17] Kim Coleman: Yeah, I mean, for me it's significant because we are open source. A lot of WordPress products are and that makes it a challenge because there's you know, if you're using GitHub, let's say there's visibility into what your team is working on, what they're developing, people can request features, people can contribute code, and that all makes, it pretty complex.

[00:10:41] When you think about your roadmap, how much are you able to involve the community in driving the direction of your product, and how much do you keep internal, to that. Then I think also because WordPress products are open products, there is some, inclination to share what you're working on and be open about it.

[00:10:59] But with that comes some expectation of delivery dates and promises that are made. So, I think it's unique in the WordPress space for those reasons. which is separate, like we don't know. You know, we might know what Google's working on. They might do like an annual report to investors, but it feels a little bit more closed door and private.

[00:11:16] So, for me, when I think about roadmaps, I think about visibility and access to them.

[00:11:24] Nathalie Lussier: That's a really great point. so our product is, you know, not, it is obviously like part of the WordPress ecosystem, but the way that we do things is a little bit more behind closed doors. So we share our roadmap, but in a more generic way.

[00:11:39] So we, we have currently open like almost like 600 feature requests or different things that we could be working on. And what we realized is that if we publish that list of 600 things, people are kind of gonna go crazy over all of, you know, the potential things that we could be working on. So that's why we chose to kind of, summarize some of the things that we're working on so that it's not so overwhelming for people and we don't really have as many contributors to our plugin the way that we've set it up.

[00:12:10] Uh, but I think, yeah, this is cool to hear the different ways of doing it. I think that's awesome.

[00:12:16] Kim Coleman: I think we might have Matt. And he might be able to speak. So I'm gonna give him a moment to test that audio out and do an intro and I'll, I'll catch you up, Matt, with kind of where we were.

[00:12:26] Matt Cromwell: Awesome. Check, check. Can you hear me? Hello? Check, check. Oh, yep. Hello?

[00:12:36] Can you hear me now?

[00:12:40] Kim Coleman: Nope, I can't. You can hear him?

[00:12:44] Nathalie Lussier: Yes.

[00:12:45] Kim Coleman: Oh, how

[00:12:45] can I not hear him? Oh no. This is our big bust.

[00:12:51] Matt Cromwell: Anybody else? Can anybody else hear me?

[00:12:52] Kim Coleman: All right, I'm gonna mute myself and let you two go for a minute and I'll figure out my audio.

[00:12:56] Matt Cromwell: Oh man.

[00:13:00] Natalie, you can hear me okay?

[00:13:03] Nathalie Lussier: Yes, no problem here.

[00:13:06] Matt Cromwell: Okay, I see somebody else indicating they can hear me too. Hopefully we get Kim back. We're like swapping hosts. Um. We are gonna make it happen.

[00:13:18] Nathalie Lussier: So we had just talked about why we think it's so important to have roadmaps and how we handle them essentially on the WordPress side.

[00:13:27] So I don't know if you wanna sh, share your perspective on that one too.

[00:13:30] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. part of, why I wanted to make sure that we talk about this is in the WP space for a while now. I, I really have seen most products really be almost completely either founder or developer driven. A hundred percent and over time I really feel like that that's been a little bit of a disservice.

[00:13:53] And so that's a little bit of the way I wanted to see things go. I mean, of course, founders, they're the ones who create the thing in the first place. They gotta be very much involved, in the way that products are, are, are built out and the main features, of of where they're going, but they have a particular perspective that I often feel like is not

[00:14:20] necessarily representative of the customer particularly well. Um. We all live inside of WordPress so often, and, we easily can build blind spots to the way we build things out and say, oh, you know, settings always look like this but, a new user comes in and, and can't quite navigate and figure out where things are at very well, because they're not as accustomed to the way things are built in WordPress as we are.

[00:14:49] So, um. That's a little bit of, was a little bit of my motivation behind this, this talk. I don't know. do you resonate with that much, Natalie?

[00:15:00] Nathalie Lussier: Yeah. I, I love that. And I recently read a quote about how software should have an opinion because all software is pretty much just a database with an opinion, which I thought was really funny, but I think that's what you're getting to.

[00:15:15] That sometimes the founder has an opinion, but maybe it should also be a co-created opinion with the users and the people actually, you know, making use of the software as opposed to completely a hundred percent based on the founder. And I think that, that's something that we try to do definitely in access that way.

[00:15:34] Matt Cromwell: Nice. I'm wondering if Kim is able to hear stuff now. She's still muted. Kim, are you back?

[00:15:43] Kim Coleman: I'm back. I have headphones on and I able to actually hear you.

[00:15:47] Matt Cromwell: Awesome. Great, great, great. Cool. Well let's back up then. And we were, I guess we were getting caught up and, let's back up and, and, um. Start from the beginning, more or less.

[00:16:00] Everyone who is here, thanks so much for being here. WP Product Talk is where we're at, and if you have questions at all for any of the co-hosts today, make sure to use the hashtag WP Product Talk and we'll be paying attention and looking out over there. thanks for bearing with us as we figured out our, uh,

[00:16:19] our audio and whatnot. that's the first time that Twitter spaces has been challenging and difficult for us, but we made it happen. yeah. And today, we are joined by Natalie Lussier. And, I'd love to go through and do some introductions. as you know, my name is Matt Cromwell. I'm the co-founders of GiveWP.

[00:16:40] Uh, we are the number one donation platform for WordPress for going on seven years now. And, um. We also, have been acquired by LiquidWeb and part of the StellarWP family of brands. Uh, and we are now also overseeing, marketing and development for iThemes, KadenceWP, and IconicWP as part of the Stellar Group.

[00:17:06] That's us. Kim, do you wanna introduce yourself?

[00:17:09] Kim Coleman: Sure. Absolutely. I'm Kim Coleman. I'm from Paid Memberships Pro. We're an independent WordPress membership plugin. I work with my partner and we've been doing that for 12 years.

[00:17:20] Matt Cromwell: Awesome. And Natalie?

[00:17:22] Nathalie Lussier: Yeah, so I'm the founder of Access Ally, which is a WordPress based solution for memberships, courses and communities, and also work with my husband, who's our lead developer.

[00:17:34] And I have a degree in software engineering, so this is kind of a culmination of, you know, all of, all of the years of work coming into it.

[00:17:43] Matt Cromwell: Amazing. That's so great. That's, I I, I'm always fascinated when businesses are run by a married couple, like, and that you both do that. I think it's so cool. I didn't realize that coming into it.

[00:17:55] That's that's great. It would not work as well with me and my wife. She has a very, very, very different skillset than mine, so, but, the topic today Kim, do you wanna introduce our topic?

[00:18:09] Kim Coleman: Absolutely. Today we are talking about, ownership of your product roadmap and the various teams within your organization, you know, who leads and owns the final decisions and, and the growth and direction your product takes.

[00:18:24] Matt Cromwell: Excellent. Great. I. So we talked about a little bit, of what, motivated this subject a bit. I wanted to hear both from Kim and Natalie. Why do you think this is such a significant question, particularly for WP product shops? I kind of answered that a little bit from my perspective earlier. Why is this important?

[00:18:44] What is this a pain point? Is this just a nice to have kind of question? what's your take on it, Kim?

[00:18:52] Kim Coleman: Sure I'm gonna, I'll say what I said, before all the drama with the thing, but basically for us, in the WordPress space as open source product, as a product that's available on GitHub, we get a lot of input from external people about what direction our product should take.

[00:19:07] The features that are most important to the noisiest voices that aren't internal to our team. And I think some WordPress other WordPress products could, could share that same problem that they face, and, and then within our team, there are lots of people that are listening to our customers that are developing and interested in certain features of our product.

[00:19:26] So, for us it's particularly important because it's easy to drive your product in a different direction than maybe your leadership intends, because of all those voices that can be involved.

[00:19:38] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Natalie was echoing that a little bit, Natalie.

[00:19:43] Nathalie Lussier: Yeah, so for us, we have someone on our team that basically is our product manager and her position is all about listening to our customers and figuring out what is that they want, and also seeing if that matches with, you know, the direction we want our software to keep growing and kind of evolving in. And, I think for us and in general for WordPress is it's super important to set expectations about what you can do and where you're headed so that you attract the right types of users or customers to your software because they feel like,

[00:20:18] there are so many different options out there, and every tool is not for every application. So if you can be as clear in your roadmap, then you're going to have people who are gonna stick with you long term. And I think that is kind of how we built our business, is kind of managing people and what they want and what the marketplace wants, but also with, you know, where we want to kind of continue to grow.

[00:20:39] Matt Cromwell: Hmm. Yeah. Excellent. cool. So one other thing there is, what, what would you say, like, I think there's a lot of folks who kind of approach this question in different ways. I kind of wrote down some notes in our, in our show notes. Like we could talk, talk about it as dev centric, marketing centric, customer centric, founder centric, or some sort of mix.

[00:21:03] I think we all would like to say that we are very mixed in our approach, but if you had to pick one of 'em, Natalie, which one do you think that you are currently at? Is it a very dev centric product roadmap? It sounds to me like you're very more customer centric.

[00:21:18] Nathalie Lussier: Yeah, I, I would say mixed, but I think for sure customer centric is our like top one.

[00:21:23] Like I mentioned earlier, we have like 600 feature requests that we could potentially be working on, but what we do is we do a lot of clarity calls. We do surveys, we do a bunch of things, you know, on our tuneup calls to kind of figure out, you know, where people are stuck, where we can improve, like what we already have.

[00:21:42] But also where they do want us to add more features and things like that too. We kind of use that data to inform our uh, priorities. For sure.

[00:21:53] Matt Cromwell: Kim, what's your take? What would you choose for.

[00:21:57] Kim Coleman: For us, it, you know, I think when you say mixed, you might, or in my mind, mixed means founder centric to a degree.

[00:22:05] Synthesizing those other three groups, the development, the marketing needs, and then those customer's needs. Maybe the marketing needs are somewhat informed by competition and just kind of landscape out there. Development needs might be, you know, more focused on, health of the platform, health of the code base, new, uh.

[00:22:23] APIs that you have to integrate with and choices like that, that developers push for, you know, modern code modernization of, of your code, refactoring of things and then I think when you think founder centric, you're looking at what are, like my short term, what's my one year, what's my 10 year goal for this business?

[00:22:39] And for this product, and how do we keep a roadmap that, continues to steer our ship in that direction year over year. while still synthesizing every need that we have today to remain competitive. To serve our customer's needs and then to stay current with our code base so that it doesn't get aged.

[00:22:56] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Are there other ways you would classify or, or like describe the way your product roadmap is, is influenced besides these ones?

[00:23:11] Kim Coleman: I, I assume that competitive landscape falls within a marketing type level, kind of a, how do we stand up against other people who are doing this in our industry? but I, I think you could mistakenly drive a roadmap on feature parody with people you, you see, to be like the industry leader. And I, I do think that's a mistake, but I think it's something early on that people have to do if, especially if you're entering in a saturated market with a product that does similar things. You're gonna spend a lot of your time of your roadmap, reaching, parity until you can begin some of the more innovative pieces, in my opinion.

[00:23:46] Matt Cromwell: No, that's a really good point for sure. And I think that's definitely an element of marketing centric. I think sometimes it's also, driven by, you know, how can we get the word out the best about, about this feature release or about this, this next, this next product we wanna launch.

[00:24:05] Uh, you know, how are we gonna be able to reach the most amount of eyeballs out in the, in the marketplace? It can be. Uh, and, and sometimes that ends up meaning like you're driving towards a solution that maybe no customers are asking for, or you're driving towards a solution that is maybe a lot harder to develop than, than than it might seem.

[00:24:27] And it's putting an overdue burden on the developers. So I think there's, there's different ways in which being any one of these two, two harshly ends up being out outta whack or out of balance. Um. But, I definitely think that, I think another word that came to my mind as you were talking, Kim, for founder centric, might even be just like business centric.

[00:24:48] Like what makes the most business sense, to, to, building out these products. uh, we'd like to believe that we know what that answer is all the time, but, we might not always. I always say I'm not my own customer. That's kind of always a personal check that I do to say like, is this assumption I'm making about this feature really based on me?

[00:25:12] Or is it based on what our customers actually want? Natalie, does that resonate with you too?

[00:25:18] Nathalie Lussier: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think there's something to be said where sometimes you make a strategic decision where you might have a lot of people asking for a specific feature and you know it's gonna take a long time to build out.

[00:25:30] And if you do that one big feature. It's gonna mean something else has to slide and potentially that could be an important business type of thing. So for example, we had like a Stripe Connect integration. And for us, like that was a business decision. It wasn't something our customers were asking for, but.

[00:25:48] It made sense to prioritize that for the long term kind of growth of the business, for example. And so, yeah, I feel like sometimes you do have to balance, you know, the things you know your customers are asking for and that do make sense but also trying to do the things that will basically keep the business going in the right direction too.

[00:26:06] And I think, you know, Kim mentioned a lot of that dev centric stuff as well because, that, you know, sometimes you need to make sure that the code is still like, super optimized or efficient or whatever it is that that needs to happen to keep it, you know, really competitive and, and working well.

[00:26:24] Kim Coleman: Yeah, there's definitely been times for us that I don't, I don't know if somebody cut out okay.

[00:26:28] Times for us where we've made a business decision. We were like, we just need cash right now. What can we develop? How can we develop features in our product that contribute cash? And those times come and go and it's not the general way that the business has to operate, but knowing that you can pull that lever and you have a back pocket list of things that, are revenue generating features, it's pretty cool.

[00:26:50] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Nice. Well, one thing I always like to do in these episodes is do story time. Go around the horn and talk about kind of your own journey with this question. How has your product road mapping approach changed over time? And very importantly, why has it changed over time? Does anybody, wanna lead on that one?

[00:27:15] Kim, Natalie?

[00:27:20] Nathalie Lussier: I can go first. yeah, so I feel like it has changed over time just as the company has grown and as we've had more customers asking for more things. So I think in the beginning it was very much, you know, we had our core small group and you know, it just made sense to, to build, again, customer centric, focused on what their needs are and, you know, keep them happy, keep them staying with us long term and then.

[00:27:45] As our company has grown, it kind of ballooned into like way too many feature requests that we can actually handle. And so that's when we brought in our product manager. And so now we have more touch points, but also more data around, you know, what are the things we should be prioritizing? And we have like a little formula that we use.

[00:28:03] So number of people who requested it is, is one number that goes into the formula. How easy is it to implement and also, um. Like long term, like does this fit with, with where we wanna go product wise on the company side? So those are all things that we kind of use to assess, a specific feature request, for example, and then the way that we also communicate it.

[00:28:28] So we definitely thought about just publishing, you know, our whole list of things and having people vote on features. But we realized for us it just made sense to kind of summarize the big efforts that we have and just show those as what's coming up for our customers. Also, I think it, it just kind of takes the overwhelm out for people who would potentially read our roadmap and be like, oh my God.

[00:28:50] Like how is this all gonna happen? Or is this too overwhelming? As we, as our customers maybe want to use these new features, I think it might be a little bit too much. So for them to know kind of the big things on the horizon has, has helped them a lot too. We do definitely have people who are like, Hey, when is this coming out?

[00:29:06] Like, we're excited, we're waiting. And so it's also kind of just setting expectations around like how often we make releases and how often we're able to release those bigger features as opposed to like the small updates and stuff like that.

[00:29:18] Matt Cromwell: Nice.

[00:29:19] Kim Coleman: Natalie's, do you, do you keep that, more public? Do you, is it available?

[00:29:23] Like, I could go to your website and, and view kind of the things on the horizon.

[00:29:27] Nathalie Lussier: Yeah, so we have our latest releases and then in each release we'll have the upcoming roadmap kind of update in there too.

[00:29:37] Kim Coleman: That's something we've always shied away from, so it's super interesting to see brands that have that in place. Go ahead, Matt.

[00:29:44] Matt Cromwell: No, I was just echoing that we also, I we, in the very early days, we were trying to show like, this is what we're gonna work on next. And it would end up being sometimes where we had the best intentions but not the best execution.

[00:30:00] And so folks were like, Hey, when's this coming out? You said you were doing this. And we're like, ah, we did say we're doing that, but we didn't do it. Uh, so we started backing off of that. Um. But, I mean that's a, I I, I, now, I might merge right into my story time a little bit. That's, that's kind of the way that we've evolved too, is that in, in the early days, I would definitely say, it was very founder centric.

[00:30:23] Devin and I would look at our product and be like, what do people need next? And we would just decide what people needed next from GiveWP, and, sometimes we'd even decide, kind of. Despite what people were saying, like very early on we released a Google Analytics add-on, and at that time we really had nobody asking for it at all.

[00:30:46] But we just, we just knew that like you, if you're a nonprofit and you're accepting donations online, you need to be using some sort of analytics tool. And so let's give it to you now. and over time of course, it did become a very popular add-on but in the early days nobody was asking for it. So there were some times when we were definitely right, other times when we just built stuff because we felt like it was important.

[00:31:08] But over time as, as things evolve, we got more and more requests all the time. Um. And I think the hardest thing was being able to balance customer requests with what actually is gonna make a lot of business sense for us. So how things have evolved I think is really, I would call it what we do now, mixed in the sense that we have a product team meeting where the needs from the support team and the development team, marketing team and the founders are.

[00:31:42] All together in one room, and we talk about what's going on currently. And we also do have a public feedback board. we use a system called canny canny.io which is a, a feedback system and folks can go there anytime they want and up vote things, and make comments on why they need it. And we can tie GitHub issues to those, posts as well.

[00:32:07] and it's publicly available on feedback dot GiveWP.com. and that is very influential in the way we do things. Now there's one really good example of how it's a little bit complicated is in that, for example, one feature that folks have asked for, for a long time is what we would call split donations.

[00:32:25] And what we found over time is that no two people agree on what that means in terms of functionality. And so balancing customer concerns or customer, asks with what's feasible from the payment gateways and what's feasible development wise and what they're actually needing has been a bit challenging.

[00:32:46] So we actually haven't been able to build that feature out quite yet 'cause it's it's, it's pretty challenging and it's hard to define clearly what that means. Um. I do like the way that we, in which we've balanced everything now between having a project management meeting weekly that's checking in on, on the current needs and wants and current issues and pain points across all the teams and listening carefully to the feedback board, and being active on that feedback board.

[00:33:14] I feel like it's resulted in pretty robust releases overall. Kim, you wanna do story time?

[00:33:21] Kim Coleman: Yeah,

[00:33:21] for sure. I will. I will. Story tell, and then we can kind of share all of what we think of each other's thoughts. But for us, starting on, very customer centric, we would build something that one person would ask for.

[00:33:33] Like, let's build an add-on for that. How exciting. Uh, and I think it came back to bite us. In the end we have over 70 add-ons at this point, and now we're looking at it and saying, you know, what can we bring into the core product? The core product a hundred percent open source and free. There's no, you know, upgraded version or unlocked professional version.

[00:33:52] It is in dot org and we're actually looking at a lot of our add-ons that are revenue drivers for us in our premium plans and realizing that they belong in the core product. So we're looking at, kind of undoing some of this ways that we've built in like revenue streams and bringing them into the core product because at the founder level are setting some goals to be.

[00:34:15] The most open source option, the most free option, and reach some huge growth targets in 10 years. And when you look at that, you think, okay, that means we have to take down the barriers of getting the core features people need, like multiple memberships per user, like special rules about expirations and renewals based on certain dates and, and things like that.

[00:34:35] So, we're kind of at a point now where those high level business founder goals are influencing the way that we roadmap. We've kind of also settled into having on GitHub kind of a next version release that's for kind of bug fixes. And then the next. Major version release, so like the 3.0 version and slating things that have been in development for some time, to go into that.

[00:35:01] So we're kind of managing two versions at one time. What's gonna go out next to just bug squash and, and fix some compatibilities and add a few enhancements. And then what is the next big thing that's adding new features or consolidating some of those add-ons.

[00:35:15] Matt Cromwell: Hmm. That's an interesting approach. I like that.

[00:35:20] One thing that really stood out to me Natalie, in your approach is I really like your tactic on customer clarity calls. It seems like, it's customer centric, to the point of making sure that you clearly understand them. Can you tell can you dig in on that a little bit? Like how do you make those happen and, and how do they go?

[00:35:44] Are they useful? Like, are they valuable?

[00:35:47] Nathalie Lussier: Absolutely. Yeah. So it's something we started doing, I don't wanna say like, maybe not a full year ago, but something close to that. And basically what we do is we just reach out to our customers and we try to do at least two per month. So we have kind of a, a wide range of different types of, you know, users of the software.

[00:36:06] And basically we asked them all kinds of questions like, you know, what made them choose access ally? Uh, what do they use it for? What are the hard things? What are the easy things that they love? Like we kind of just talk all, all of the different, you know, possible angles of how they're using the software.

[00:36:24] And a lot of times what surfaces is, you know, they came for a specific feature or they came for a specific integration or something like that. And then we kind of dig in a little bit deeper and kind of figure out like, is that working the way that they expected? Is there a mismatch with our marketing or with our other expectation setting?

[00:36:43] Is there a way that we can improve that for them? If it's more of like a learning curve thing, like how can we make those types of improvements? 'cause sometimes it's not just like a new feature, but it's making our existing features easier to use. So, almost two years ago we released like a brand new interface for Access Ally.

[00:37:01] And that again, was one of those things, like you can roadmap it and no one's asking for it, but we know it needs to be worked on because we knew that the way things were set up initially with our interface. It worked at the time, but things had gotten more complicated over time as we added more functionality.

[00:37:18] So we had to kind of retrofit things to, to work better for people. So yeah, a lot of that can come up from those clarity calls and, you kind of have to read between the lines a little bit and it's not always exactly what they say, but, sometimes we do also have the ability to show them something we're working on.

[00:37:36] For example, we have, this enrollment limit feature that we've been working on for a couple of months now. And so we're going to, you know, we had people on clarity calls and they talked about like, oh, I wanna do cohorts for my courses. And so we can say, oh, well we actually have something we're working on

[00:37:51] I can kind of show you a quick demo and then see if that would actually solve your your problem. Your problems are kind of the things you're trying to accomplish with, with your enrollment. So, yeah, sometimes we do bust out something that we're working on that we can kind of demo on those calls.

[00:38:06] But a lot of times it's just listening and taking a lot of notes. Uh, we record them and then we actually have like a meeting with the whole team to just kind of bring back the, the findings so everyone on the team is in the loop on, on all of those.

[00:38:21] Kim Coleman: I love that. I love that you, um. When you're listening, you're not thinking only development or only marketing.

[00:38:28] You're using that, to kind of influence all of it. How has our support been performing for this person? How has our, our marketing been clearly communicating how to use our tool properly? And then of course, how can we better develop our tool, to meet people's needs and, and make it more simple for them to access what they're looking to do?

[00:38:45] I love that.

[00:38:46] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. What would you I'll suggest for, let's, let's think of like a, a, a relatively small WordPress product that's just getting off the ground. They're, they're, they're freemium in one way or another free product with some sort of paid addition in, in one form or another. And, they're definitely of course, founder centric at the moment.

[00:39:10] They want to start getting more customer input and customer feedback in their roadmap. What would you say is the very first thing they should do?

[00:39:24] Nathalie Lussier: I feel like in this case it, it would help be super helpful to jump on calls with people. I know sometimes it's a little bit harder when you don't have a ton of users, or maybe they're not, you know, super communicative yet but I feel like even offering like, I don't know, just like a little bit of advice or consulting as like a thank you for them in whatever capacity, depending on what kind of product you have

[00:39:47] or some other type of incentive, like, I don't know, Starbucks gift card or something like that to just get people to say yes and get on a call with you. Uh, those are the types of things, like you'll get so many insights from actually talking to a human being as opposed to like running a survey or that kind of thing.

[00:40:02] So that would be how I approach it. And maybe Kim, you have another, another approach or other ideas.

[00:40:08] Kim Coleman: Yeah, I definitely, I support the talking to customers early, launching something, even if it's not what you think your total complete product will be, knowing that you can add on later. But it's very, very hard to take away a feature that you're unsure about after it's been released

[00:40:22] to sunset or to remove an aspect of a product is a super challenging, thing. You have to do it with a lot of grace. I would add, use the product yourself and become your own customer and however you can imagine doing that It's helpful to you as a, as a product to, whether it's a family member who you can convince to launch a business or, you know, have a use case for your product or other people close to you, or you yourself as your business

[00:40:48] because I think that, that you're sharing your customer's experience in a way that you can't, when you're not using your product. And then I think also look closely at support, the flavor of support tickets. Where people are getting stuck. If you know Justin Ferman who exited LearnDash, you might know that he's coming out with a product called Gapc Scout, and it's going to specifically look at all of the support tickets you're receiving, maybe across channels,

[00:41:13] how people are reviewing your product and the terms and phrases they're using when they give positive reviews and negative reviews. And I think gonna try to consolidate that all into actions you can take to market better or document better, and of course develop better.

[00:41:32] Matt Cromwell: That's awesome.

[00:41:33] Kim Coleman: I wanna throw a question out there. And how does WordPress itself, the macro WordPress development and growth and change, how do you consider that into product road mapping? Either of you have a opinion?

[00:41:48] Matt Cromwell: Uh, you mean in terms of like the way WordPress as a software is heading, like both identity and all that?

[00:41:55] Yeah. Uhhuh. Exactly. It's a good one. you know, in many ways. So right now in the moment, we are building what we've been calling the next gen donation form builder, which is a Gutenberg powered donation form builder.

[00:42:14] And we're really excited about it. We think it's the future for sure, for GiveWP at least. and the way we're doing it is kind of unique. It's, it's not like. It, there's a lot that goes into it, but essentially, Gutenberg is basically a, a big framework that can be used in a lot of different ways.

[00:42:31] You don't have to use the whole entire thing in order to build off of it and we're basically making like a custom editor, with the Gutenberg framework. The reason why we started doing that was because of how mature Gutenberg has become and how that, when it comes to editing content in WordPress, more and more folks are expecting a visual builder and Give

[00:43:00] today is really just a big form of a bunch of settings and you don't know what your form is gonna look like until you hit publish and take a look at it, or preview. Um. And so we really felt like as WordPress is evolving, to be so much more visual in the editing experience we don't want to get left behind.

[00:43:22] So that definitely heavily influenced our, our desire to, to go in this direction. but it only got confirmed once our development team really dug in and saw that Gutenberg really does have, a lot of the tools in order to do this where. Two years ago or three years ago, it really didn't, it we, we, it wasn't ripe and ready at that stage.

[00:43:44] So I think that's a big practical way that I would answer that personally. Natalie, do you have something on, on your mind?

[00:43:52] Nathalie Lussier: Yeah. It's funny because I feel like we don't take much of it into account. I know it sounds terrible, but I feel like we're so head down on our feature requests and the things people are asking for.

[00:44:04] We do look a lot at how we integrate, especially with visual things. So our customers really care about their design, so you know, how we integrate with other themes or builders and things like that. And so definitely, you know, Gutenberg, you know, definitely influence how we do things, but I feel like beyond that we kind of just keep up and make sure it still works together, but it doesn't really influence a ton, how we're gonna change so far at least.

[00:44:32] Matt Cromwell: Hmm.

[00:44:33] Kim Coleman: I definitely, I like the pace at which you've talked about Matt, like waiting to watch Gutenberg, mature some. it was really challenging, you know, years ago, a few years ago now, to have come on board with some of the features that, that Gutenberg has now. You would've been always changing directions for your product.

[00:44:54] So I think watching WordPress and the new things coming as a product that you have a large user base supporting, you know, keeping it in mind, but not letting it, you know, the next shiny thing that you have to be, fully supporting in those moments. Just let WordPress itself kind of mature. Let that component mature and then figure out, if it's here to stay, how does it best work for our product and for our customer base.

[00:45:15] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. It's a really good question. I mean, it is a unique thing for products like ours that fit in the WordPress space, how kind of beholden we are to, where this platform is taking us. Uh, I mean, I think it would be similar for folks who are building on Shopify in particular, or anyone who, maybe is doing like, mobile games that are on the Play store or the, or the Apple store.

[00:45:44] They also have certain kind of limitations they have to consider, considering the environment that they're building in. but that I do think in many ways that comes that it does have a bit of a development, focus, in some ways but also I think it's also very customer-centric in the case of WordPress at the moment, just simply because the way in which WordPress has radically altered the whole admin interface over the last few years. That's fascinating.

[00:46:20] Kim Coleman: I know we started a bit late, but if, either of you have like a last point that you wanna bring up or a question to ask, we can go a little longer. We usually try to keep these to 40 minutes, but our, our kickoff was a little awkward.

[00:46:35] Matt Cromwell: I defer to Natalie first.

[00:46:39] Nathalie Lussier: Yeah, I think a good question probably to wrap up or kind of a, a last point I think would be. Just kind of remembering what it's all for, right. So I think all of us, we kind of start these businesses with a certain intention or a certain reasoning behind them. We kind of started because we built it for ourselves first, and then other people were asking, Hey, what are you using?

[00:47:02] And then we made it into like a full on product and business. And so just kind of remembering those roots and also that further vision I think will help everyone who's trying to decide like, how do I run my roadmap and how should I publish or not publish or really, you know, organize it and make sure that it's doable.

[00:47:20] And I think the other side of it too is just, you know, what are your resources, both development time, you know, hiring all of these things, talent on your team, and just kind of remembering that we all have constraints and that, we all need to not burn out. So that's kind of another big part of, of a roadmap sometimes is like,

[00:47:40] we wanna promise everything to everyone, but being realistic with what we can actually accomplish within a certain time period, I think is better for expectations of, of people who are using it as well. So, you know, we've had big, big intentions in the past where we're like, yes, we're gonna like release this great, great new version, you know, 4.0 or whatnot, and it's taking us like six months longer than we thought, and that's okay too.

[00:48:03] So yeah, those are kind of just some closing thoughts, I would say.

[00:48:07] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. That's a good one. I think my biggest closing thought is I, I have really found overall that getting our various teams, and leaders within our, our, our, our team involved in the product roadmap has just really elevated, their job satisfaction and their morale.

[00:48:27] Like when they feel like they are personally invested in the product and they have a say and a voice and how it gets shaped and where it's going, their, their, their loyalty to the company and to the team just really gets amplified a ton. So. I think I would just encourage everyone to really think of new and different and creative ways to get your team very much

[00:48:52] actively involved in how your product is shaped and where it's going. I mean, they are the boots on the ground, the ones that are out there, listening to your customers all the time and doing the, the outward work all the time. And they have, they love the product ideally, and and they have great insights.

[00:49:11] That's why you hired them. So, use your team as much as you can.

[00:49:16] Kim Coleman: I'm gonna extend on that, Matt, and with, you know, my final thought being, sometimes you can throw the product roadmap aside and allow your team to do some exploratory work. So it could be for a new product you're exploring, it could be for your core product.

[00:49:32] We use Shape Up, so we have kind of on cycle, off cycle time, and that off cycle time is when we let the team members who have kind of a passion PET project or something, they just wanna spend a week or two days, just trying. And whether that's growing their development skills, growing their writing skills, you know, helping us explore like kind of a really wire framed, you know, scrapped together version of something that could be a feature later.

[00:49:55] It, it helps you build your roadmap because you've kind of learned a lot through that, you know, trial process.

[00:50:07] Matt Cromwell: That's awesome.

[00:50:10] Kim Coleman: A little hole for a couple days and dig in.

[00:50:15] Matt Cromwell: That's excellent. Cool. Cool. Well, I think we have hit more than our 40 minutes, but uh this has been a great talk, Natalie. So glad to have you on board today. and everyone, if you, can do us a favor and just retweet Kim's tweet with this uh, with this Twitter space

[00:50:38] with the hashtag WP product Talk and tell us, tell the world what your takeaway is from today. One little thing that you learned, one little thing that you liked, one little thing you thought was obnoxious. Any and all of the above I think are helpful. also wanna give a quick shout out to the WP Minute.

[00:50:56] Thanks for, redistributing these talks over all the podcast things. If you're a podcaster, you could catch it on all the podcast platforms through the WP Minute. Feel free to subscribe over there like stuff over there. Thanks everybody so much. Natalie Kim, and next week, what, who do we have next week?

[00:51:15] Kim?

[00:51:15] Kim Coleman: Next week we have interesting topic. We're gonna be focused on how to sunset a product that's limping. And limping is kind of awkward, I guess of a word, but a product that you're just not, you know, seeing fit with the market, but it exists out there. and how, and, and do you go about removing it from the world?

[00:51:37] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. And our guest is actually my business partner, Devin, so I'm excited about that. Devin and I have sunset a few products in our day, so we're, this is gonna be a fun and uncomfortable conversation. Cool. Thank you everybody so much.

[00:51:57] Nathalie Lussier: Thank you. This was awesome. Have a great day everyone.

[00:51:59] Kim Coleman: Absolutely. You too. Thanks.