While 89% of product teams are conducting user interviews according to recent industry data, there’s a critical gap between gathering user input and uncovering the insights that actually drive business results.

We see this all the time in our client work. Teams building features that competitors have without competitor data, or developing features based on the loudest customers without checking the significance of those friction points.

So what’s the solution?

The companies consistently shipping features that move the needle know the difference between asking users what they want and understanding what they actually need. It starts with discovery research.

What is discovery research in UX?

Discovery research in UX is the foundational phase of user research that focuses on understanding user problems, needs, and contexts before any solutions are designed.

Unlike evaluative research methods that test existing designs or prototypes, discovery research explores the unknown territory of user behavior to uncover opportunities and define problems worth solving.

Discovery research helps you understand use cases and user needs. It can ground you in what problems to solve and what is going on in the market.

This grounding is essential for product teams who want to build features that users actually need and will drive growth.

Discovery research typically involves methods like user interviews, field studies, diary studies, and market analysis. These approaches help teams understand the broader context of user goals and challenges before jumping into design solutions. The insights gathered during this phase become the strategic foundation for all subsequent product decisions.

Discovery research versus UX discovery

While these terms are often used interchangeably, there’s an important distinction that affects how product teams approach their research strategy.

Discovery research specifically refers to the research methods and activities used to understand user needs and identify problems. It’s the “how” of gathering insights through interviews, observations, and analysis. This includes techniques like ethnographic studies, user interviews, and competitive analysis.

UX discovery, on the other hand, is the broader strategic phase that encompasses discovery research, but also includes other activities such as technical feasibility assessments, business viability analysis, and stakeholder alignment. UX discovery is the “what and why” that frames the entire early-stage product exploration.

Think of discovery research as the tactical execution within the strategic framework of UX discovery. A comprehensive UX discovery process will include multiple types of discovery research methods. It also considers business constraints, technical limitations, and market opportunities.

For SaaS product teams, this distinction matters because it clarifies roles and expectations. UX researchers lead discovery research activities, while product managers typically orchestrate the broader UX discovery process that incorporates research findings into strategic decisions.

Understanding this difference helps teams avoid the common mistake of treating research as a checkbox activity rather than a strategic input that informs product direction.

Benefits of discovery research

Discovery research delivers tangible benefits that extend far beyond the research team, directly impacting product success and business outcomes.

Reduces development risk and waste

The most immediate benefit of discovery research is risk reduction. By understanding user needs and the specific problems before development begins, teams avoid building features that miss the mark. This is particularly critical for SaaS teams where failed features mean ongoing maintenance costs and technical debt that compound over time.

Enables data-driven product decisions

Discovery research transforms product decisions from opinion-based to evidence-based. Instead of stakeholder preferences driving priorities, user insights guide development resources toward the highest-potential impact opportunities.

Uncover hidden opportunities

Discovery research often reveals unmet user needs that aren’t obvious from analytics or existing feedback channels. These insights can become the foundation for innovative features that differentiate your product in the market.

Improves cross-team alignment

When discovery research findings are shared across product, design, and development teams, everyone gains a shared understanding of user priorities. This alignment reduces conflicting opinions and streamlines the development process.

Accelerates time-to-market for successful features

While discovery research requires upfront time investment, it actually accelerates the development of successful features by ensuring teams build the right things from the start.

Enhances user satisfaction and retention

Products built on solid discovery research foundations better meet user expectations, leading to higher satisfaction scores and improved retention rates. Users feel heard and understood when products solve their actual problems rather than perceived problems.

This is essential for SaaS businesses where discovery research can identify the difference between features that drive daily engagement versus one-time usage, directly impacting churn rates.

When to use discovery research

Discovery research is best leveraged as part of a continuous research strategy.

Teresa Torres, expert and author of Continuous Discovery Habits, recommends weekly conversations with customers. “Continuous discovery means weekly touchpoints with customers by the team building the product, where they conduct small research activities in pursuit of a desired outcome.”

The goal is to take research from something you pause to do, into something you always do.

Many leaders will have experimentation rituals that allow quick and consistent feedback on ideas/products, but it’s rarer to see teams prioritize discovery on a frequent cadence.

When you manage discovery in batches or isolated sprints, it can mean you miss out on opportunities or delay solving urgent problems for customers.

Common discovery activities in UX

Effective discovery research employs multiple methods to build an understanding of the problem landscape and market conditions. Not all are required, but a combination will give a better picture to work off.

Diary studies

For understanding user behavior over time, diary studies ask participants to record their experiences, thoughts, and interactions over days or weeks. This method is particularly valuable for SaaS products where user needs evolve or vary based on different use cases and timeframes.

User interviews

One-on-one conversations with users can be a great pillar of discovery research. The key to successful interviews in discovery is asking open-ended questions that help explore user motivations, frustrations, and workflows. A good foundation is to conduct 6-8 interviews per user segment to get a picture of current challenges and behaviors.

Field studies and contextual inquiry

Observing users in their natural environment provides insights that interviews alone can’t capture. Field studies reveal the environmental, social, and technical factors that influence user behavior, uncovering needs that users might not articulate in interviews.

Competitive analysis and market research

Understanding the competitive landscape helps identify opportunities for differentiation. It also uncovers whether user problems are being adequately solved by existing solutions. This desk research complements user-facing research methods.

Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) research framework

JTBD research helps frame what job users are “hiring” your product to do. It can help you think beyond features to understand the fundamental progress users are trying to make in their lives or work.

Card sorting

This method helps teams understand how users categorize information and conceptualize problem spaces. Card sorting is particularly useful for discovering how users naturally group features or content areas.

Survey research

While qualitative methods provide depth, surveys can help uncover findings across larger user populations. Use surveys to quantify the prevalence of problems discovered through qualitative research.

Leveraging discovery research for better outcomes

In an era where 83% of designers, product managers, and researchers agree that research should be conducted at every stage of product development, it’s critical to understand discovery research in UX.

Discovery research is a tool that helps you dig into current user needs and prioritize the problems worth solving. It provides the user insights needed to build theme-based roadmaps, prioritize high-impact features, and avoid costly development mistakes. Most importantly, it ensures that every dollar spent on product development addresses real user needs rather than perceived problems.

Ready to make discovery research work for your product team? The Good specializes in helping SaaS companies uncover the user insights that drive product success. Our team combines deep research expertise with practical product strategy to ensure your research translates into features that drive growth.

Get in touch with The Good to discuss how discovery research can accelerate your product development and improve user satisfaction. Let’s turn your user insights into your competitive advantage.

The post What Is Discovery Research in UX? appeared first on The Good.

But then the metrics start to roll in. Conversion rates are flat. Churn is up. Customer satisfaction scores haven’t budged.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone.

Most SaaS companies are stuck in a feature factory, churning out functionality users don’t want, don’t use, or actively avoid. While your competitors are optimizing the core experiences that drive growth, you’re polishing the peripheral features.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: You’re probably building the wrong things.

The hidden cost of feature bloat

Low-impact features aren’t just harmless additions to your product; they’re silent growth killers. Every hour spent building or optimizing a feature that doesn’t move the needle is an hour stolen from something that could grow your business.

But what exactly makes a feature “low-impact”? It’s not about whether the feature works or whether someone, somewhere, might find it useful. Low-impact features are those that:

• Address edge cases rather than core user needs
• Generate minimal usage after launch
• Don’t correlate with key business metrics like retention or expansion revenue
• Create more complexity than value

According to research by UserPilot, the average core feature adoption rate is 24.5%. That means more than 75% of features might as well not exist from a user perspective.

When a SaaS company prioritizes those extra features, it is likely suffering from feature bloat.

Feature bloat is costly for your team, your users, and your business. An excess of features creates complexity and detracts from your product’s core value. Sometimes, feature bloat can actually prevent your product from doing its main job.

The cost of feature bloat develops quickly. Some examples include:

Development opportunity cost: While your team builds that quirky reporting dashboard that three power users requested, your core onboarding flow continues to hemorrhage trial users.

User experience degradation: Every new feature is another decision your users have to make, another item in the navigation, another potential source of confusion. Research from the Nielson Norman Group shows that feature bloat directly correlates with decreased user satisfaction and other industry experts agree. Jared Spool calls it experience rot and often highlights the inevitable complexity creep and user experience decline that occurs when teams add features without ruthless prioritization.

Technical debt accumulation: Low-impact features still need maintenance, bug fixes, and updates. They create dependencies that slow down future development and increase the risk of breaking changes.

Low-impact features don’t just waste resources; they actively prevent you from building high-impact ones.

Consider a hypothetical case of a B2B SaaS platform that spent six months building an advanced scheduling feature requested by their largest enterprise client. The feature worked beautifully for that one client, but sat unused by 98% of their user base. Meanwhile, their core product suffered a 60% drop-off rate during onboarding. This was a fixable problem that could have doubled their conversion rate.

The real kicker? That scheduling feature became a maintenance burden, requiring updates every time they changed their core platform. What started as a “quick win” became an ongoing resource drain.

Warning signs you’re in the feature bloat trap

It isn’t always easy to identify if and when you’re prioritizing low-impact features. Here are some of the common red flags that might make you think twice about how you’re building your roadmap:

• Lack of data: Decisions based on gut feeling rather than data-driven insights can easily lead to prioritizing the wrong things.
• The squeaky wheel syndrome: Your roadmap is driven by whoever complains loudest, not by what data shows you should build.
• Internal politics: Sometimes, features are prioritized based on the influence of certain stakeholders rather than their actual value to the user or the business.
• Fear of risk: High-impact features often involve more risk and uncertainty. Teams might opt for safer, less impactful options to avoid potential failures.
• Shiny object syndrome: New feature ideas consistently trump optimization of existing functionality, or the allure of new and trendy features can sometimes overshadow the importance of addressing core user needs.
• Short-term focus: A focus on immediate gains can lead to neglecting long-term strategic goals and prioritizing quick wins over sustainable growth.
• The metrics disconnect: You can’t clearly articulate how each planned feature connects to business outcomes like revenue, retention, or user satisfaction.
• Poor prioritization framework: Without a clear and consistent framework for evaluating and prioritizing features, it’s easy to fall into the trap of prioritizing the wrong things.
• The “just one more thing” mentality: Features keep getting added to releases because they seem small and easy.

The longer your team functions in the trap of any of these situations, the harder it is to change the behavior. So, if this resonates, try to get your team on board to shift behavior and implement some of the strategies we outline below.

A better way: Data-driven prioritization

The solution isn’t to stop building features, it’s to build and optimize the right ones. This means establishing clear criteria for what constitutes “high-impact” before you write a single line of code.

Start with the outcome, not the output

Instead of asking “What features should we build?” ask “What user behaviors drive business growth, and how can we encourage more of them?”

Implement continuous user research

Don’t just collect feature requests, use them as an opportunity to understand the underlying problems. Continuous research that includes things like regular user interviews, behavioral analytics, and feedback loops can help you distinguish between what users say they want and what actually drives value.

Continuous research also allows you to test assumptions before implementation. Including rapid testing in your workflow can help you get fast, early feedback on concepts from real users for better direction.

Let the data guide decisions

Base your prioritization decisions on data from user research, analytics, and market analysis so that you can focus on what users truly need and what will drive the most significant impact.

Use prioritization frameworks consistently

Tools like RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) or the ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) scoring model help you compare feature ideas objectively. The specific framework matters less than using one consistently.

At The Good, we use the ADVIS’R Prioritization Framework to guide our optimization strategy.

Measure everything

For every feature you build, define success metrics upfront. If you can’t measure whether a feature is working, you can’t determine if it’s worth the investment.

Consider the indirect impact

Sometimes, a feature might not directly impact a North Star metric but could have a significant indirect impact. For example, improving the onboarding experience might not immediately increase conversion rates but could lead to higher user retention and lifetime value in the long run.

Focus on your most valuable users

Part of building and optimizing the right features means understanding your users. If you haven’t, conduct a step-by-step user segmentation study to help identify your highest-value users. Then you can tailor feature prioritization and optimization to their use case before moving on to other segments. A feature that’s high-impact for one segment might be low-impact for another.

Embrace the power of “no”

The most successful product teams are ruthless about saying no to good ideas so they can say yes to great ones. Create explicit criteria for what doesn’t make the cut. It’s okay to say “no” to features that don’t align with your strategic goals or offer significant value.

Moving beyond the feature bloat factory

Breaking free from the low-impact feature trap requires discipline, but the payoff is substantial. Companies that master prioritization don’t just build better products; they build products faster, with fewer resources, and with much better business outcomes.

The goal isn’t to build everything your users request. It’s to understand what truly drives value and relentlessly focus on that.

Your roadmap should be a strategic weapon, not a wishlist. Every feature should earn its place through clear evidence that it will move the metrics that matter.

Stop building features. Start building value.

Struggling to identify which features truly drive growth? Our Digital Experience Optimization Program helps SaaS companies cut through the noise and focus on changes that move the needle.

The post The Biggest Roadmap Mistake: Prioritizing Low-Impact Features appeared first on The Good.

But I’m here to tell you that while you might be raring to take action, there is one more key step to ensure success: sharing the roadmap across your organization.

And by this, I don’t mean sending out a single ‘FYI’ Slack message and calling it a day. I mean real communication that fosters understanding and alignment for what you have outlined in your roadmap. The way you communicate your roadmap could make or break all the incredible product optimizations and plans you have in there.

When cross-departmental teams are on board with your roadmap, there is no question about plans or prioritization. The roadmap serves as a shared plan of action and keeps the organization on track for product goals.

Here’s how you do it.

Give your roadmap a home and start building visibility

The first step in communicating a roadmap across the organization is creating a home for it. It needs to be visible and accessible to your team. Ideally, it lives somewhere that is natural to your internal workflows/tooling and is frequently accessed by your team.

This could mean:

• Uploading to Google Drive or Sharepoint
• Pinning to a dedicated Slack channel
• Creating a shared Airtable or Notion base

For the perfectionists out there, there’s no one right or wrong way to store your roadmap. It will depend on your organizational structure, size, and goals.

Once you have a home for your roadmap, start building visibility. While it’s good for you to know your roadmap like the back of your hand, it’s even better for your teammates to get invested.

A siloed roadmap is a debilitated roadmap, so make sure various team leads can access it.

Tailor the messaging based on stakeholders

A good product leader can bridge the gaps and translate messages across teams. This is a skill you’ll need to leverage when communicating the roadmap across your organization.

The best messaging for sharing the roadmap will likely look different based on the stakeholders you’re working with.

Leadership

Generally speaking, organizational leadership prefers to focus on high-level goals and outcomes rather than the specific features you’ll use to achieve those goals. While this isn’t true for every leader, it’s a good place to start.

Focus on themes in your roadmap to explain to your leadership or external stakeholders what you hope to achieve and your expected performance. How you achieve it doesn’t really matter as long as you’re solving the problem.

Outline what you’re trying to achieve and share what this stakeholder audience will find most relevant. For example:

• Themes
• Objectives
• Initiatives
• General timeframes

Individual contributors

When sharing with individual contributors, you’ll likely want to get into more of the “why” and the “how” than you would with leadership. It may spur some debate, but it will allow your team to discuss tactics within the context of the theme and possibly come up with unique ways to achieve your goals.

More specifics will come in handy, including:

• Specific tasks and milestones
• Detailed timelines
• Ownership

Shoulder teams

There is also value in sharing the roadmap with people who might not always be part of the product strategy or executing the roadmap but can offer a lot of valuable input based on their experience in other areas of the company.

Connecting across departments and getting early buy-in makes teams work faster and ship better products.

The most effective products are built with human-centered product management in mind. This ​​approach creates products and makes decisions based on and for the user, and it also prioritizes collaborating with teams outside of the day-to-day work and connecting with them where they are.

Shoulder teams benefit from knowing more theoretical elements like:

• How the roadmap impacts their roles/department
• Overview of projects
• What benefits and value it can drive

In many cases, working with different experts means learning to speak their language and translating between teams. Getting everyone on the same page can be tough, but it is worth the effort.

Pick the right forum and format

“The medium is the message” is a mantra repeated by communications leaders around the world. The forum in which you share a message is equally as important as or even more important than the message itself. This rings true for sharing roadmaps as well.

A roadmap isn’t just a list of priorities; it’s a story of where you’re going and why. Sharing that story in the right forum builds alignment and trust, while sharing it in the wrong one can leave it overlooked.

So, what are some ways to communicate your roadmap beyond typical sharing methods like a presentation or email?

In our conversations with B2B research leaders, René Bastijans gave some tips on how to circulate research that can be applied to roadmap dissemination as well. Visibility is key to making sure that teams reference the roadmap and use it to help make decisions.

He builds alignment and visibility through what he calls “Learning Lunches,” 25-minute presentations with Q&A designed to share insights and keep everyone moving in the same direction. You can apply the same approach to your roadmap by creating an informal, open forum where teams can ask questions and gain clarity on how the roadmap impacts their work.

Get together to present the roadmap and share updates on progress. This more casual approach to a presentation offers learning opportunities for the team, helps them feel ownership over the product, and, in turn, continued buy-in.

Another effective forum for communicating your roadmap is one-on-one conversations with the team. While you may not be able to get to everyone at the organization, finding ways to share your plan in a more intimate environment fosters trust and helps show more individually what impact the roadmap will have on their role.

At your organization, a presentation to each team or even an email might be the right fit. Just be sure to leverage a dedicated time when your audience is focused and invested.

Make sure your roadmap drives growth

Your roadmap is more than a strategic document. It’s a powerful tool to align teams, prioritize efforts, and deliver better user experiences. But even the most thoughtfully crafted roadmap can only reach its full potential if it’s communicated effectively across your organization.

By giving your roadmap a visible home, tailoring your messaging to different stakeholders, and selecting the right forums to share it, you can foster alignment, buy-in, and momentum for your product vision. Thoughtful communication transforms your roadmap from a static plan into a shared mission.

If you’re looking to build a customer-centric roadmap or need help identifying the highest-impact opportunities for your product, The Good can help. Our team of digital experience experts partners with companies to uncover customer insights, prioritize optimizations, and deliver measurable results.

Let’s work together to turn your product roadmap into a growth-driving force.

The post How To Communicate Your Roadmap Across The Organization appeared first on The Good.

We get it. Tactics are seductive. Why? Because they’re easy and they feel like doing something.

You can find lists of tactics and “best practices” all over the web. But without a foundational strategy behind them, standalone tactics aren’t likely to move the needle. You need custom solutions that are selected to address your specific conversion barriers.

So, before we talk about tactics, we have to talk about themes.

A theme-based roadmap is a problem-focused approach to optimization that supports the entire optimization process. It has to come before the tactics.

Does this mean that tactical roadmaps are out of fashion? Not at all! Tactical roadmaps also have a place in your product development efforts, but they need to come at the right time.

In this article, we compare theme-based and tactical roadmaps, including how they fit into your product plan and how you can use them to optimize the digital experience. Both have their place in product strategy, but they are not interchangeable.

What is a Theme-Based Roadmap?

A theme-based roadmap is a strategic planning tool for product managers (whether that product is a website, app, or service) that lays out a plan for improvement based on overarching themes or goals rather than specific features or timelines.

Think of it like a guiding “product vision” document that synthesizes data or research into a clear overview of opportunity/problem areas. “Themes are a promise to solve problems, not build features,” says Jared Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering.

In the roadmap, themes are represented as categories or clustered ideas, and specific tactics are nested within each theme (more on that in a moment).

These categories most often group initiatives based on customer needs they meet, like security, ease, and usability. This is true at The Good, as we theme based on user goals to create our DXO Heuristics Compass. In the artifact, research is translated into grouped on-site behaviors and friction points.

Theming based on customer needs helps you stay user-centered. Your organization will keep the proven user barriers top of mind, and prioritize what the customer cares about most.

Alternatively, some may prefer to cluster based on business goals such as user acquisition, engagement, retention, monetization, etc. Check out this business theme-based roadmap example from ProdPad. Notice how the organization’s broad initiatives are organized into categories.

Clustering your thematic roadmap based on business goals will ensure your entire team stays aligned with broader business objectives. It prevents you from getting bogged down in individual tasks or features.

When to Use a Theme-Based Roadmap

Before you can develop custom tactics to address your conversion barriers, you need to understand the context. That’s where a thematic roadmap comes in. It defines the important areas, audiences, and conversion barriers.

A theme-based roadmap is useful where flexibility, strategic alignment, and focus on broad outcomes are crucial. Here are some situations where a theme-based roadmap would be beneficial:

• Early-stage products where an understanding of the market and user needs is still being formed
• When you need to ensure alignment across multiple teams or departments.
• In situations where you need to allocate resources based on priorities (not projects).
• When you need to communicate the vision of a product without getting lost in the specific details or projects.

The theme-based roadmap is a great tool for getting early buy-in and staying aligned with your team. It can also be used to inform other roadmaps, like your tactical roadmap.

What Should a Theme-Based Roadmap Include?

Here’s a breakdown of what a theme-based roadmap typically includes:

Themes: These are categories of problems and opportunities that you identify based on data analysis, research, and user testing. Themes are broad and can encompass multiple features or projects that contribute to the overarching goal. For example, a theme could be “directional guidance” or “trust and authority.”

Objectives: Under each theme, there are specific objectives that define what success looks like for that theme. Objectives should be measurable and align with the theme’s overall goal.

Initiatives: These are the projects or sets of features that will help achieve the objectives under each theme. While initiatives are more specific than themes, they are still described at a relatively high level compared to individual tasks or features. Initiatives sometimes take the shape of user stories.

Timeframes: Unlike traditional roadmaps, theme-based roadmaps often use broad timeframes rather than specific dates. You might even use lighter prioritization by categorizing themes as “first,” “last,” or “later.” This creates flexibility and adaptability so teams can respond to changes without being tied to rigid deadlines.

What is a Tactical Roadmap?

A tactical roadmap is a specific planning tool that outlines the step-by-step actions and timelines required to solve the challenges or address opportunities outlined in your thematic roadmap. It provides a clear path of execution, detailing what needs to be done, by whom, and by when.

Here’s an example of a tactical roadmap from Toptal. Notice how tactics serve each theme. There can be multiple tactics with a theme.

The tactical roadmap follows a strategic roadmap. It only serves you if you have done the research, planning, analysis, and prioritization before putting it together.

When to Use a Tactical Roadmap

A tactical roadmap is more detailed and focuses on specific tasks, features, and deadlines. It’s ideal for scenarios where clarity, detail, and timelines are crucial. Here’s when you might opt for a tactical roadmap:

• When the project or product requirements are clear and well-defined (meaning you have specific steps, features, or tasks to achieve objectives).
• Your product is in a mature stage where your focus is on enhancement and optimization rather than exploration.
• Situations where you have fixed deadlines or non-negotiable deliverables, such as contractual obligations to other brands or regulatory compliance requirements.
• When multiple teams or departments have their own deliverables on a shared project.
• When you need to track progress against specific milestones.

What Should a Tactical Roadmap Include

Here’s a breakdown of what a tactical roadmap typically includes:

Initiatives: Specific initiatives, projects, or tasks that need to be completed to address the theme. These should be broken down into manageable chunks of work.

Timeline: A clear timeline indicating when each tactical initiative will be executed. This could be broken down into quarters, months, or sprints, depending on your needs.

Ownership: Who owns the initiative? What are their roles and responsibilities?

Milestones: Checkpoints that mark progress or achievements for each initiative.

Resources: Any resources, including budget, workforce, and technology, needed to execute each initiative successfully.

Communication: How progress will be communicated to stakeholders, including regular updates, status reports, and meetings.

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The Benefits of Theme-Based Roadmaps

At this point, you’re probably wondering why you should use a thematic roadmap vs. a tactical one. Building your roadmap around themes offers four powerful benefits:

1. Themes are Better Tools to Solve Customer Problems

Is it best to use nails or screws in woodworking? That’s a question of tactics, but the question is inherently limiting. Maybe neither is appropriate. Maybe there’s a better tactic, like glue, tape, or something unique.

Your problem– the theme–is to attach two pieces of wood. By focusing on the problem, you give yourself the freedom to find the best solution. Tactics come later. We always refer back to the theme to make sure our tactics are moving us in the right direction.

For example, adding an industry license badge to your product page is a great way to build trust. But you shouldn’t simply add the badge and pat yourself on the back. Job well done, right? Not quite. Now, you have to actually measure whether it creates the intended trust. Otherwise, you have no idea if your tactic satisfied the theme.

2. Executives and Stakeholders Often Prefer Themes

Generally speaking, your organization’s leadership prefers to focus on high-level goals and outcomes, rather than the specific features you’ll use to achieve those goals.

(This obviously isn’t true for every leader, so your strategy may vary.)

With a theme-based roadmap, you can explain to your leadership (or external stakeholders) what you hope to achieve and your expected performance. For instance, you might say, “We’re going to implement social proof on our product pages that we expect to improve user trust and confidence in purchasing.”

Whether that social proof takes the form of written reviews, video testimonials, case studies, or a celebrity endorsement doesn’t really matter to your leadership, just as long as you’re solving the problem.

3. Theme-Based Roadmaps Create Better Team Alignment

A theme-based roadmap outlines what you’re trying to achieve. This document should be shared publicly throughout your organization because it’s a great way to keep everyone aligned.

Organizations that use theme-based roadmaps tend to have fewer team meetings. There’s less to talk about because team members understand the organization’s priorities.

Furthermore, a theme-based roadmap is great for spurring debate. It allows your team to discuss tactics within the context of the theme and possibly come up with unique ways to achieve your goals.

4. Thematic Roadmaps Create Effective Prioritization

A theme-based roadmap helps you identify which tasks are important and deserve more of your focus and optimization dollars. For instance, it’s hotly debated that testing call-to-action colors can boost performance, but other initiatives are far more impactful.

By prioritizing themes, you can focus on the projects that move the needle the most. This ensures you’re always getting the biggest benefit upfront (which also helps you keep those key stakeholders happy).

How to Determine Your Roadmap Themes: The Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization

Before we get into how to organize the themes, let’s look at some examples of roadmap themes.

If you’re theming based on customer needs, a handy tool is the Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization. We have found these six common optimization issues or opportunities are a great starting point. They include:

• Priming & Expectation Setting: Setting users up for success by clarifying how the interface will perform, what actions users should take, and managing their expectations. For example, explicitly mentioning free shipping early in the journey can reduce cart abandonment rates.
• Trust & Authority: Establishing trust from the outset with users. This is critical because issues like bugs or anything that violates users’ sense of trust can lead to disengagement. Building trust enhances users’ confidence in the website. Violating it can lead to abandonment.
• Ease: The ease of use throughout the website, including aspects like information architecture, navigability, and seamless functionality. Making a website easy ensures that users won’t abandon it due to its complexity.
• Benefits & Unique Selling Points: Highlighting the benefits and unique features of products or services to persuade users to choose to purchase here versus elsewhere. This includes factors like faster shipping times, better product quality, or the vendor’s reputation.
• Directional Guidance: Supporting users in finding and discovering what they need through visual hierarchy, way-finding, and guiding them to the next best step in their journey. This is particularly helpful for users who may need extra assistance in decision-making. Think of them as your friend who never knows where they want to go for dinner. We’re offering them an easy guide to follow. Directing users towards desired actions or outcomes.
• Incentives: Additional motivation for users to make a purchase or convert, such as expedited shipping for VIP members, promotional offers, or guarantees. Incentives add not only confidence but sometimes urgency to act promptly. Ideally converting today rather than at a later date.

Beyond that, how do you determine which themes are right for you? The process goes like this:

1. Map Your Conversion Journey

Break down the customer journey into stages and study how customers interact with your product at each stage. Use data to understand how customers move through the conversion journey. Where do they spend the most time? At what point do they convert, and where do they drop off?

2. Identify Conversion Barriers

Use analytics tools, customer feedback, observation techniques, and user testing to identify where and why potential customers drop off or disengage. These barriers could be related to user experience, product features, pricing, customer support, or any other aspect.

In the following example, the organization identified a delay in the purchase process as a conversion stopper. You can see the tactics they’re using to address it.

3. Create Alignment with Business Goals

Ensure that your themes align with the broader business goals. Whether it’s market expansion, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, or innovation, your roadmap themes should directly contribute to these overarching objectives.

4. Iterate and Evolve

Themes should not be static. As you gather more data and generate insight, revisit and adjust your themes to ensure they remain relevant and impactful. Ideally, you should establish a regular interval to review your theme-based roadmap and adjust if necessary.

5. Prioritize Your Themes

In many cases, we find it effective to organize your themes based on your user’s conversion journey through your site. In the case of an ecommerce site, that tends to look like this:

Home page or landing page > category page > product page > shopping cart > checkout.

We identify the themes that relate to each area of the site based on how they help us achieve a goal. Here’s a visual of what that looks like.

As you can see, the theme of “directional guidance” is present on almost every page because we must always actively move the user to the next step. “Priming” is an important theme on the product page, but not useful anywhere else. “Trust and authority” is useful in the later stages, but it’s not helpful on the home page.

Other Types of Roadmaps

There are many types of roadmaps you can use to guide your organization. They all serve different purposes and have their own benefits and drawbacks. For the sake of clarity, let’s quickly walk through some other types of roadmaps you might encounter or create.

Feature-Based Roadmap

A feature-based roadmap is a planning tool that outlines the specific list of features and enhancements planned for a product over time. It focuses on detailing the exact features that will be developed, improved, or launched. Feature requests are added to the feature-based roadmap over time.

This roadmap provides a clear and itemized list of what the development team will be working on. The team members who implement the feature-based roadmap aren’t necessarily marketers. For instance, a data scientist may be asked to pull reports, or a web designer may be asked to build a page.

Strategic Roadmap

A strategic roadmap lays out the high-level business priorities and key objectives of your organization over a long-term horizon. It bridges the gap between your company vision and the actionable plans needed to realize that mission.

This rigid roadmap focuses on the major strategic themes, critical initiatives, and milestones that will guide that journey. It does not dig into granular tasks.

Technology Roadmap

A technology roadmap outlines the planned tech advancements your organization intends to undertake. It ensures that technology investments are aligned with business goals. It also includes timelines for new technologies, upgrades, and eliminating obsolete tools.

Data Roadmap

A data roadmap is a plan that highlights how your organization intends to collect, manage, analyze, and leverage data to make informed product decisions and drive business growth. It outlines key data initiatives, governance policies, infrastructure upgrades, and analytics tools that will be used.

Marketing Roadmap

A marketing roadmap is a strategic document that outlines the marketing strategies, campaigns, and activities planned over a specific timeframe. It keeps the marketing team aligned by listing objectives, target audiences, channels, content plans, and metrics.

Themes to Tactics

Think of a thematic roadmap as an elegant solution that diagnoses your problems. Tactical roadmaps, on the other hand, are the medicine that treats the ailment.

And just like you visit a doctor for a diagnosis, it’s important to consult with a digital optimization expert to find out what’s wrong with your digital product and learn how to address it,

At The Good, we’re the optimization experts who can identify the main themes that support your growth. Then we can prescribe the medicine (a tactical roadmap) that will make your product strong.

Learn more about our Digital Experience Optimization Program, a custom program that unlocks the full potential of your website, app, or digital product.

The post Theme-Based Roadmaps: How They Differ From Tactical Roadmaps & Why We Always Start With Themes appeared first on The Good.

You have a goal to deliver the best experience in your industry, whether it’s ecommerce, SaaS, digital media, or something else. You want to convert more of your visitors, grow your user base, or increase subscribers.

If you’re thinking, “I already have a plan and plenty of experiments in progress.” First, congratulations! We love to hear that. And second, this is actually the perfect article for you.

I’m sharing a step-by-step exercise for the end of the year that takes learnings from past experiments or tests and helps you leverage them to compound results.  

This will inform the plan that will turn your dream of a better digital experience for your customers into a reality.

Why should you be thinking about this now?

As Q3 quickly comes to a close, the holiday season and planning for next year are right around the corner.

For most ecommerce, SaaS, or digital media companies, you’re probably beginning some sort of holiday campaign that was planned months ago.

The end of the year is mapped out, so make time on your calendar next quarter to start considering your roadmap for next year. What are your goals for your digital experience? And how are you learning from the past year to inform the next steps to reach them?

For many companies, the best way to start answering these questions is with a three-step optimization process that reviews your digital experience and tests from the past year to help inform your plan for the future.

We recently went through this optimization process with a client, so let’s take a look at what this looks like in action.

Step 1: Review Key Analytics Data

The first step in the optimization process is to review progress from the year.

Specifically, run a data report in Google Analytics for a 12-month period and pay special attention to the following:

• How session count changed over the year
• Where that traffic came from
• How conversions changed by:
  • Device type
  • Top user groups
  • Channel groupings
  • KPIs

This helps you understand where there was growth and where to focus your efforts next year.

Here are what some of the key learnings from the analysis might look like:

Example Key Learning #1

Learning: Traffic trends show the highest session count in X month

Details: Breakdown by source and medium shows a decrease in session count YOY from Google organic and CPC, with a larger increase in traffic associated with social campaigns, email, etc.

Opportunity: Prep for email campaign for mid-year

Example Key Learning #2

Learning: X% increase in goal conversion rate compared to the previous year.

Details: There was an increase in overall goal completions compared to the previous year, slowing down in X months. We see similar growth in mobile and desktop conversion rates (+X%, X%)

Opportunity: Examine mobile experience to continue growth in this area

Example Key Learning #3

Learning: Form submissions increased

Details: Looking at the form submission trends, we see an increase across all goals with the largest impact on X form submissions

Opportunity: Revisit form analysis on key landing pages

These learnings and the associated details give the context that will inform any seasonal opportunities, growth areas, or sticking points.

Step 2: Review Tests From The Past Year

Next, if you have an active conversion optimization or experimentation program, review:

• All of the tests that you have run in the past year
• The results of those tests
• The learnings from the results

Each learning can become a follow-up concept, with the metric results gathered from the test helping prioritize a roadmap.

For example, if a test on a certain element of the site did not produce a huge impact on conversions, the learning may be that you need to make bigger changes in that area of the site in order to have an impact. This is something you want to pull out and keep in mind if you decide to test other optimizations to that element next year.

A good process for this step is to outline all of the tests that you have run, then one-by-one refresh yourself and your team on the hypothesis, background, and learnings from the experiments.

If you’re presenting this to the C-suite or other organizational stakeholders, we’d recommend you start with an overview slide with site area and key metrics and then one slide per test to get into the details. Review the main highlights and only get into the details if they are particularly relevant (or if your stakeholders are interested).

Opting In To Optimization

Over a decade of conversion optimization learnings packaged into just a handful of immutable laws.

GET YOUR COPY

Step 3: Identify Pending Questions From Experiments and Conduct New Research

The next step is to identify any pending questions from your past experiments and supplement them with research as necessary.

For example, you may want to run new session recordings or user tests on winning or losing variants of experiments to understand what additional opportunities for optimization or why your hypothesis may have failed.

In action, this could look something like this. If the mobile variant of a paid landing page test didn’t perform as well as the desktop variant, you may establish new research questions and run additional user testing.

In this scenario, let’s say you revisited session recordings of users who opted into the mobile variant of your experiment. You can see users are missing the main CTA and then abandoning. This behavior suggests that users do not feel like this is the primary action that they should take on the page, so there may be an opportunity to rework how you present the CTA in your next iteration of this test to position the CTA to guide users towards that goal.

By reviewing what was learned in the first test (that the mobile variant wasn’t performing as well as desktop) and supplementing the research, it became a compound learning (identified that there wasn’t a clear enough CTA).

This illustrates how the exercise can offer new opportunities for a future roadmap. You have the background from original research, you’re armed with insights from the variant that didn’t perform like we hypothesized. You’ll be able able to apply that to a future roadmap.

In summary, after reviewing tests, do an experience review of key pages, based on past learnings and current user behavior. Use that information to compound learnings and identify opportunities to build a better user experience.

(Bonus) Step 4: Prioritize Opportunities & Allow Your Learnings to Compound

Now that you’ve done the 3-step optimization process, it’s time to ideate on opportunities. This is also where you begin to prioritize a roadmap for the following year.

Here is a bonus, in-depth article to guide you through the process: How to Build an Efficient A/B Testing Roadmap.

The goal of this step is to get your roadmap together, taking into account the exercises we just went through. So, make sure your roadmap includes:

• Opportunities identified by analytics data from the previous year
• Follow-up concepts based on tests you ran last year
• Uncovered sticking points from your experience review of key pages
• Any testing opportunities you have put off to revisit in the following year

The deliverable can look something like the above. It should outline the areas of the site you want to test, prioritized by what concept you would run.

Consistency Compounds, So Keep Your Learnings Top Of Mind All Year Long

That’s a peek into some of our strategies for making sure learnings compound YoY. The longer you run an experimentation program, the better your experience becomes. This is because you’re consistently compounding your learnings about users and improving your optimization process.

To summarize, before you create next year’s roadmap, make sure to:

1. Review key analytics data
2. Review tests from the past year
3. Identify pending questions and supplement them with research

The exercise of reviewing your site data, experiments, and learnings from the past year will help you build on any optimizations to create an even better digital experience.

Keep in mind that visibility into learnings can help guide future concepts throughout the year, not just at the end. A great way to do this is to keep a dashboard of your key data, learnings, and insights handy. But, that’s a topic for a different day.

If you’d like your learnings to compound and your wins or results to do the same, we can help you launch or expand your experimentation program. The Good works with ecommerce and product marketing teams to optimize the digital experience with research, validation, and implementation. Get in touch here.

The post Compound Learnings From Your Experimentation Program With An End Of Year Roadmapping Exercise appeared first on The Good.

How should you decide what to optimize on your site, and in what order? How do you identify high-value testing opportunities? How can you prevent multiple tests from interfering with each other? 

The optimization process can be a bit overwhelming for any stage of business, which is why creating an A/B testing roadmap is such a critical step. The process of creating an optimization roadmap is essential because it requires you to define your goals, align with stakeholders, and assess priorities and risks; it’s not just about outlining a testing schedule. 

Whether you’re a researcher, an analyst, a marketer, or an optimization specialist, this insight is designed to connect those from any discipline with the clear steps they need to create an optimization roadmap. We’ll cover how to: 

• Identify clear objectives for your testing program
• Establish website challenges
• Isolate testing opportunities
• Formulate testing hypotheses
• Prioritize your testing opportunities

Start with clear objectives

To set a testing program off to a good start, teams and individuals should make sure they are aligned on a clear understanding of what they are hoping to achieve within a testing program. The objectives you select may depend on a number of factors including the maturity of your brand, the saturation of the market, and the competitive landscape. 

Examples of common A/B testing roadmap objectives include: 

• Improve conversion rate to purchase
• Increase average order value
• Increase new user product engagement

For teams just starting out, we recommend focusing on only 1-3 primary testing objectives and ranking those in order of priority. Increasing conversion rates might be more important to your team than improving email signups, so knowing where to put your time and attention and aligning across the testing team (and other stakeholders) is a non-negotiable first step.   

Conduct research to establish website challenges

When you’re aligned on what you’re aiming to improve with your testing program, start the research. Research is conducted to set baselines, surface patterns, and establish challenges. 

There are two types of research, and both are important: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative research techniques are used to establish metric baselines and surface potential friction points in the user journey. Qualitative research adds a human element to data patterns; It tells a story that the data sometimes can’t on its own. 

Quantitative Research: Every team approaches research differently, but our method relies on starting with the data. By looking at one to two years of analytics reports, we form hypotheses for what’s happening across the user journey. Scope should include reviewing things like channel mix, landing pages, time-on-site, and events across the site experience.

After a thorough data analysis, you should have a good understanding of two things: optimization areas and baseline metrics.

• Optimization Areas are the pages or areas of the site that can be optimized to improve the customer experience and influence your established goals.

• Baseline Metrics are numbers that represent how your product or website is performing today in areas that are important to you. (Advanced reports will include how those metrics change based on traffic channel, device type, landing page, or seasonal fluctuation.)

Qualitative Research: When it comes to telling a story with the data, we look to qualitative research. Qualitative methodologies like conducting user testing, cataloging session recordings, and designing open format surveys are non-negotiable for our team; while the data can show us where users are dropping off, qualitative methods tell us why. 

State the challenges and isolate A/B testing roadmap opportunities

After thorough research, you should have clarity on the established challenges. For our team, this manifests in a literal list of friction points that need to be addressed, but for the purpose of demonstration, let’s imagine that we wrote all of our challenges on yellow sticky notes. 

A note on challenges: as you compile a database of challenges stay user-focused, rather than product-focused. The problem with product-focused challenges is that they tend to hint at a solution that you’ve already thought up. The prescriptive nature of product-focused challenges will have you optimizing through brute force rather than thoughtful finessing. User-focused challenges work to address user needs and improve the customer experience. By focusing on user needs you’ll unearth new ways to solve the challenges presented to you in the research phase. So stay user-focused. 

Looking at the well-researched, established challenges in front of you, it’s time to divide and conquer. 

When it comes to sussing out what makes a good testing opportunity, our team uses a combination of a point system and a gravity method, but every team does this differently. A simple version of defining testing opportunities is to simply put challenges into three buckets: Implement, Test, & Consider. 

• Implement. This bucket should contain all of the problems that are so low-risk that it’s an easy decision to just solve them immediately.
  • Examples: website bugs, form field errors, and missing content. 
• Test. This bucket is generally the largest group of concepts. Use this bucket for challenges where the solution may be less clear, the challenge could be solved with multiple solutions, or the test itself will teach us something valuable about our audience.
  • Examples: hero messaging where internal interests are divided, filter layouts where the important filter categories are undefined. 
• Consider. This bucket is usually a small but mighty list of challenges just not suited for testing, either requiring deeper consideration or great resources to address.
  • Examples: platform limitations, reshooting product images, or rethinking product names. 

Step away and get inspired 

After compiling a deep bench of testing opportunities, much of the hard work (for this round) is done, so give yourself a pat on the back, acknowledge the milestone, and go explore. This is where a hunger for good user experiences comes in handy.

In order to gain some fresh perspective, it’s at this point that we recommend stepping away from the problem in front of you. This could mean looking at competitive user experiences, drawing on your experience in the real-world, or sleeping on the problem. 

One way our team at The Good formalizes this process is with a collaborative weekly meeting where we evaluate web experiences for three buckets of content: stealable, not stealable, and questionable. This open-format approach tends to be quite fun, and it’s been a great way to maintain a culture of experimentation and collaboration. These sessions train our eyes and inspire debate, but they also fuel inspiration that we bring to the design phase. Win-win! 

As you explore, take note of the moments when you say “that might work for this challenge” – those are the hypotheses forming and they represent the spark of inspiration. You’ll capture your hypotheses in the next step. 

Formulate Testing Hypotheses

I hesitate to call hypothesizing a whole step unto itself, because for our team, hypotheses are an important part of the design process; the design and hypothesis happen in a constant dance where who’s in the lead can shift and change. 

Maggie Paveza, Strategist here at The Good says: 

“I typically have the ‘what I hope to impact’ part of the hypothesis down as a result of the research phase, but the ‘how I plan to do it’ really comes out of creating the design or having a seed of an idea.”

Whether the chicken or the egg comes first, the important step here is to catalog a hypothesis and attach it (either physically on post-its, or digitally in a project management tool) to the challenge that it’s solving for.

This assures that you don’t lose sight of the user challenge, which is our driving force, after all! 

Helpful Hint: Hypotheses are not simply the inverse of challenges. Remember how we advised on surfacing user-focused challenges? A user-focused challenge can inspire multiple hypotheses, and a hypothesis can solve for multiple challenges. Read more on crafting a good hypothesis.

Prioritize your tests

Once your testing opportunities are defined and you’ve accumulated several worthy testing hypotheses, many folks will want to jump right into design. But you probably don’t have the resources or desire to just start designing every solution at once. This is where careful A/B testing roadmap prioritization comes in. 

Be warned that prioritizing is not always simple. For individuals with some experience, identifying the biggest opportunities will probably be second-nature. For teams however, there are usually politics involved, which is where various established prioritization models* can come in handy. 

For those just beginning a testing program, we recommend keeping it simple: organize your tests by funnel point (or page) and select a few particularly exciting opportunities across various points of the conversion funnel. This assures you’ll minimize decision paralysis, and it has the benefit of keeping your team motivated; Working on what’s exciting will keep your team invested in the process long enough to gain momentum. 

Prioritize, design, critique, then repeat

Once you have a prioritized list of testing opportunities, congratulations! You have created a testing roadmap. But simply having a roadmap does not mean that the prioritization is done. 

At this point, you’re ready to move on to design. As you work through the design phase, allow yourself the authority to re-prioritize your roadmap. We recommend regular meetings to collectively evaluate upcoming test hypotheses and designs before they go to development. 

Formalizing this pre-development review is a valuable way to improve your testing skills and keep the visual design aligned to brand guidelines. But there is a more important outcome of this meeting, which is that a natural micro-prioritization happens simultaneously.

Reviews will occasionally reveal that a design cannot be executed within the testing environment or that additional creative and/or development resources are needed. In those cases, you may find that you either need to simplify a design or altogether deprioritize a concept while you compile needed collateral. This micro-prioritization assures your team maintains momentum. They’ll progress with easier tests while compiling the needed resources for more complex challenges in the meantime. The resulting sprints will contain a healthy mix of testing opportunities with varying levels of ease and impact, and your team will learn a lot in the process. 

As you get more sophisticated with experimentation, make sure you’re armed with a great prioritization system like the ADVIS’R Prioritization Framework. It’s best for teams who are already running experiments, wants to develop a more systematic approach to experimentation and have oversight from a decision-maker who wants transparency into the process.

What’s next for your A/B testing roadmap?

As you build your A/B testing capabilities, don’t let overthinking get in the way of actually launching tests. Eventually you may want to plan your testing roadmap for the clearest results, but in the early days of experimentation done is better than perfect. 

Young testing teams often want to increase their A/B  testing velocity, but taking the proper approach to measuring the impacts of your tests will help your team grow in expertise. As you launch and close your tests, measuring the impact can be as much fun as finding the A/B testing roadmap and opportunities! Evaluate testing outcomes with a keen eye for iteration and other potential tests. 

As you tackle your ideas and your existing roadmap grows shorter, be sure to conduct periodic conversion research to surface new opportunities and keep an open feedback loop with your audience. We’re all about helping new testing teams cultivate a culture of experimentation, so if you’re looking for expert advice on how to build the strength and collaborative skills of your new testing team, reach out to us.

Happy testing! 

*A word on prioritization models: Prioritization models come in all shapes and sizes, and there is no one right way.  These models facilitate in surfacing the biggest opportunities, overcoming bias, and putting effort in the right place. But the right model for your team depends on factors including who is in the room and what the culture of the organization is. Ease, for instance might be very important to a team of 1, but not as important to a team with a highly experienced A/B test developer.

The post How to Build an Efficient A/B Testing Roadmap appeared first on The Good.