your roadmap is lying
it never made it to the roadmap.
👋 Hey, I’m Suhas, and welcome to this week’s edition of the TPF Weekly!
A planning cycle typically used to start the same way for many product teams: someone opens a new doc, copies what they can from Slack/support channels, and try to recall whether anything useful came up in a customer call a few weeks ago.
Think about it.
Shreyas Doshi wrote last December that most people entering customer conversations are seeking confirmation when they should be seeking learning.
Most product teams I talk to are not struggling to collect feedback.
With Intercom, Zendesk, Gong, app store reviews, customer interviews, the collection infrastructure is there. But then when happens after the feedback is in?
Think of it as feedback debt
A bug report buried in Zendesk has a signal the week it's filed. By the time someone's building the roadmap six months later, it's effectively gone.
This is predominantly because no one bothered to resurface it / prioritise it.
The most honest feedback tends to come from sales call transcripts and email threads.
In those conversations, customers aren’t performing for a feedback form. They’re telling you, in their own words, why they’re annoyed.
Despite all the note-taking tools, it tends to remain a note unfortunately.
The voice you’re hearing is already a biased slice, and the channels you’re not monitoring shrink it further.
So what ends up on the roadmap isn’t wrong, exactly.
It’s built from the feedback that happened to be in front of you which is a different thing than the feedback that was there.
What this costs
Pendo studied over 600 products and found 80% of features are rarely or never used.
They put the industry cost of this at $29.5 billion a year in R&D spend on things customers don’t touch.
Amazon launched the Fire Phone in 2014 with more customer feedback infrastructure than most companies had built at that point and still got the analysis wrong.
The post-mortem finding pointed out that the team had built around what the most vocal internal stakeholders wanted and missed what phone buyers needed.
What a real system does
A system that closes the loop has to do four things.
1. Pull from every source automatically, not just the ones someone remembered to check.
2. Cluster feedback into themes without asking a human to tag every ticket.
3. Let you query the full corpus in plain language.
4. And close the loop back to the user who asked, so “I reported this months ago and nothing happened” stops being the first g2 review of your product.
“So what’s the solution, Suhas?”
I thought this is a people issue. And then I tried Olvy.
It ingests from Slack, Intercom, Zendesk, HubSpot, Discord, customer calls, and app store reviews.
And runs an AI layer across all of it: clustering feedback into themes, tagging each piece by type, working across 100+ languages so international feedback lands in the same place as everything else.
The corpus stays queryable in plain language, so asking what the top complaints about onboarding are this month returns an answer drawn from every source, with the original feedback attached.
Most feedback tools require you to manually tag what counts as a real signal. Olvy’s auto-listener makes that call on its own.
Themes that surface in Olvy sync directly to Linear, Jira, or ClickUp, so a pattern that emerges from 60 support tickets becomes a backlog item without anyone manually carrying that context across systems.
And when something ships, Olvy notifies the original customer who asked for it, on the channel where they asked.
This is what honestly needs to be done.
I loved them so much that I asked them for a deal for all our subs.
You can get a lifetime 30% discount on any Olvy paid plan for the next 2 weeks if you use the code PFOLKS30 at checkout.
One thing to do this week
Before your next planning cycle, trace your last three roadmap decisions back to the feedback that drove them.
Find the source document, find the exact words the customer used, and see if the thread is there.
If it isn’t, you’ve found where the work needs to happen.
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Have a great week,
Suhas 👋🏻
P.S. This gets better when the right people are in the room. Share it with one.