At one of our first quarterly customer advisory meetings last year we were discussing our product roadmap; a customer who has been using the software for years asked "What is your software designed to do?" Caught a little by surprise I gave a standard answer and we moved on, but the question stuck in my head. It may sound very basic, but at the time there was no clear-cut answer. Over the years I had seen hundreds of customers use our software in different ways but I never really narrowed it down to its most basic components. Shortly after, our product managers worked towards gaining a better understanding of how to answer this basic but critical question. Working directly with as many customers possible, the product managers broke down how they use our software, validating their needs, and understanding their expectations.

We found our customers basically do three things, want three things, and use three primary areas of the software: 

We re-aligned most of our organization and product planning around these themes. We now have product managers responsible for each of these areas. They constantly debate the importance ranking of these areas but no clear winner has emerged. What's important is, our customers want all three!  A software solution that's designed to help them "Streamline, Manage and Grow their business."