When developing or improving existing products, it is always a challenge to select the features and functionalities that deliver both what the customer wants AND what is technologically and economically feasible. To do that, when deciding on the features, you can:

  1. just follow your instinct.
  2. “borrow” from your competition
  3. or you can ask your customers or your consultants.

Well, we do all of that. But how do we prioritize features for the best price-performance ratio? In Fleetman, we use two powerful tools and a finely tuned process.

First, we are continually collecting all potential ideas. From everyone. Nothing gets left behind. Our customers, our product team, marketing…basically anyone can access our Ideas portal that we incorporated in our product website. We are using a well-known Czech product development tool called #Productboard. And while still learning to use all its capabilities, it already helps greatly in organizing the process. With Productboard portal we collect inputs from the market trends, from the development community and, perhaps most importantly, from the daily practice of our customers.

Then, we evaluate and prioritize the list of features during regular meetings of all stakeholders. Development, marketing, sales, management…it is often long and lively meeting, you can imagine. But in the end, we have a prioritized Roadmap where we roughly know the value and cost of these features.

In the third phase, we use another mighty tool: #AzureDevOps where we take the approved Roadmap feature through development, testing and deployment, while taking into consideration the inputs from the previous two phases.

So that is how we choose new functionalities for Fleetman development. With the help of #productboard and Azure #devops and striving to balance customer needs and satisfaction on one side with technological and financial feasibility of the product on the other. 

Tomáš Pavlíček, Product Director

Konica Minolta IT Solutions Czech