Beyond the roadmap: Working with customers to drive product innovation

Customer input on your product is table stakes. What most SaaS companies need to work on is engaging customers to drive real product innovation. 

Your customers have insight that your product team lacks. Harnessing that expertise is how you turn your customers from users into evangelists. And, CS teams can help make it happen.

Our CTO was my favorite guest to bring to customer meetings at my last job. There was no one better to bring authentic excitement about what we were building in our products. And customers really appreciated the feedback loop on what we were prioritizing and why.

And, in the best meetings, our CTO gained deep technical empathy about our customers' biggest challenges. 

For example, a large media customer's technical team shared challenges with concurrent editing in WordPress. Their custom code that supports their enterprise use cases helped shape innovation in collaborative editing.

How is your team engaging customers past feature requests to turn their insights into product strategies?