Software

“What are we building next?”

By
Steve Hazelton
December 2, 2022
5 min read

Since starting Sturdy, we have learned that about 50% of support tickets and 15% of emails contain a roadmap-informing data point.

I have worked on the product side of software for about 20 years, and the most common question from management is, “What are we building next?”. It is a question that I ask myself almost every day.

Answering “what to build next?” isn’t always easy, but explaining “why we are building this next?” never is. 

(Inevitably, engineering will want one thing, support another, and sales yet a third. But I digress.)

We were not venture-funded at Newton Software, so building the wrong feature could have killed us. We took these decisions very seriously.

We had 3 weekly meetings to inform our “why build it?” decisions. Our Support Team leaders were in charge of mining tickets for the most common bugs, “how do I do this?” items and feature requests. Our Customer Success leadership was responsible for capturing similar data, mainly found in email. And finally, there was a third meeting with Sales leadership, where they informed us of the features they need to close more deals. 

In other words, we manually harvested data from multiple data silos and teams to inform product development decisions. This data was in support tickets, emails, chats, and phone calls. Someone would need to manually record data in something like JIRA or Salesforce to even have it. If they didn’t record it, we didn’t get it.

Effectively capturing data to inform product roadmaps is probably the most important thing a software company can do. As product planners, we rely almost entirely on other teams to manually source, process, and organize this data. The teams have other jobs though…

After Newton was purchased and we were in a larger organization, it became apparent that manually converting conversations into data was too time-consuming and expensive. It didn’t happen. As a result, we had almost no data informing our product decisions. 

That’s why (after exiting Newton) our “What do we build next?” question was answered with, “Let’s build something that turns all of our customer feedback, tickets, conversations, and emails into some real data!”

Every time a customer contacts your company, they want you to listen. You want to listen. Take this simple challenge: count the number of new support tickets you got last month and cross reference JIRA. Did 50% of those tickets turn into data? Now try the same thing with email. We know it’s not easy.

By turning all of this feedback and information into data, product planners can access and employ the voice of the customer to make informed product decisions. If making more informed product decisions is essential to you, give Sturdy a look. 

Don’t hesitate to contact me at steve@sturdy.ai if you have any questions or comments.

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It's churn.

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Retaining and growing our customers is the only repeatable, compounding, capital-efficient growth lever left in B2B businesses.

📉 CAC is way up.

📉 Channels are saturated.

📉 Talent is expensive.

📉 Competition is fierce.

📉 Switching costs are low.

The path to $100M used to be “sell, sell, sell.”

Today? It’s “land, retain, expand.”

No matter how strong your sales motions are or how slick your product or service looks during the sales process, if your customers are churning, you’re stuck in a leaky bucket loop of doom.

Every net-new dollar you win is offset by dollars you lose. It's just math.

Yet most GTM orgs still operate like retention is someone else’s problem. "That's a CS thing."

  • The CS team might “own” the customer post-sale.
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  • RevOps might model churn with last quarter’s data.
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But in reality, churn is the CRO's problem. We wear it - or should.

If your go-to-market motion isn’t designed to protect and grow customers from Day 1, you’re not just leaving money on the table — you’re setting fire to it.

Retention and expansion aren’t back-end functions. They’re front-and-center revenue motions.

The most valuable work these days starts after the contract is signed — not before.

We need to stop treating post-live as a department and start treating it as the engine of durable growth.

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"How are we using AI internally?"

The drumbeat is real. Boards are leaning in. Investors are leaning in. Yet, too many leaders hardly use it. Most CS teams? Still making excuses.

🤦🏼 "We’re not ready."Translation: We don't know where to start, so I'm waiting to run into someone who has done something with it.

🤦🏼 "We need cleaner data."Translation: We’re still hoping bad inputs from fractured processes will magically produce good outputs. Everyone's data is a sh*tshow. Trust me. 🤹🏼♂️ "We're playing with it."Translation: We have that one person messing with ChatGPT - experimenting.

😕 "Just don't have the resources right now."Translation: We're too overwhelmed manually building reports, wrangling renewals, and answering tickets forwarded by the support teams.

🫃🏼 "We've got too many tools."Translation: We’re overwhelmed by the tools we bought that created a bunch of silos and forced us into constant app-switching.

🤓 "Our IT team won't let us use AI."Translation: We’ve outsourced innovation to a risk-averse inbox.

It's time to put some cowboy under that hat 🤠 . No one’s asking you to rebuild the data warehouse or perform some sacred data ritual. You don’t need a PhD in AI.

You can start small.

Nearly every AI vendor has a way for you to try their wares without hiring a team of talking heads to perform unworldly 🧙🏼 acts of digital transformation.

Where to start.

✔️ Pick a use case that will give you a revenue boost or reveal something you didn't know about your customers.

✔️ Choose something that directs valuable work to the valuable people you've hired.

✔️ Pick something with outcomes that other teams can use.

Pro Tip: Your CEO doesn't care about chatbots, knowledgebase articles, or things that write emails to customers.

What do you have to lose? More customers? Your seat at the table?

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We obsess over hiring A-players. But even the best GTM talent will flounder if the foundation isn’t there.

I’ve seen companies overpay for “rockstars” who quit in 6 months—not because they weren’t capable, but because they were dropped into chaos. No ICP. Bad data. No process. No enablement. No system to measure or coach.

Great GTM teams aren’t built on purple squirrels. They’re built on a strong foundation.

That foundation looks like this:

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✅ A clear point-of-view that your team can rally around in every email, call, and deck

✅ Defined stages, handoffs, and accountability across marketing, sales, CS

✅ A baseline reporting system to see what’s working—and what’s not

When this exists, you can onboard faster, coach better, and scale smarter. It's not easy, and it’s not sexy, but it works.

Want to cut CAC and increase ramp speed? Start with your infrastructure. Hire into a structure.

How many customers will you have to lose before you try Sturdy?

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