Let’s be blunt: guessing your feature priorities is a fast track to wasted sprints, bloated backlogs, and disappointed users. Yet time and again, product teams sit around whiteboards, huddle over spreadsheets, or blindly follow executive “gut feelings” to decide what gets built next. That’s not strategy, that’s roulette.
Here’s why guessing your feature priority and roadmap is a problem and how to fix it.
You might think your next feature is critical. Maybe a few users mentioned it. Maybe a competitor launched something similar. Maybe it “just feels right.” But unless you’ve validated demand with real user signals—qualitative or quantitative—you’re flying blind.
There’s a massive difference between what customers say they want and what actually moves the needle. Prioritizing based on assumptions is like investing in a company because your friend said it’s “probably going to moon.” Good luck.
You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s worth repeating: you are not your user. Your needs, your intuition, and your thinking process are different from theirs. That cool feature idea you thought of in the shower? It might solve a problem that only exists in your own workflow.
Product-market fit comes from listening, not projecting. You need real feedback loops—customer interviews, usage analytics, churn reasons, sales objections—to tell you where the product actually hurts.
Every time you ship something nobody asked for—or worse, something that makes life harder for users—you chip away at customer trust. The same applies internally: when teams spend weeks building a shiny feature that flops, morale takes a hit. Team members start questioning your judgment. It spirals.
If your roadmap is just a list of features pulled out of thin air, it’s not a roadmap—it’s a wish list. A real roadmap is a hypothesis about how to create customer value and business impact. That means it should be testable, adjustable, and informed by evidence.
Your roadmap shouldn’t be carved in stone and evolve as you learn more. Locking it based on guesses locks you into bad decisions and missed opportunities.
Instead of relying on assumptions or scattered feedback, use FeatureHunter to create a system where real user demand drives your roadmap.
FeatureHunter helps you:
- Prioritise based on value: FeatureHunter gives you clarity on how much a feature is worth(money) so you’re not guessing what matters most.
- Understand who’s asking: See which features are coming from your high-revenue accounts.
- Validate before building: Whenever you have an idea for a new feature, post it to FeatureHunter and check if it is something your users actually need.
- Keep them updated: Notify users when progress is made on a feature they asked for. Thus turning feedback into loyalty and reducing churn.
With FeatureHunter, your roadmap becomes evidence-based, flexible, and aligned with what actually matters to your customers and your business.
Your roadmap is too important to be a guess. If you’re serious about building products people want, then you need to treat feature prioritization like a discipline—not a guessing game. Stop building based on intuition and start building based on insight.
Because in SaaS, the only thing worse than building the wrong thing is doing it confidently.
If you have any comments or suggestions DM me: @sharpyann
