By Cole Anderson
We serve a wide variety of early childhood development providers and agencies, intending to enable the highest quality of care and achieve operational excellence. Our product roadmap and prioritization sessions are always guided by this mission and a commitment to scalable improvements that serve all our customer segments (not just the largest).
As a Product Owner, one of the most important responsibilities I have is to ensure that our Development team is always focused on the most important work, the features, improvements, and bug-fixes that impact our clients the most. That prioritization requires inputs from a team that understands not only our strategy and mission, but also the day-to-day operations of early childhood agencies across different states and programs. We’re lucky to have a strong Client Success team that has built a two-way relationship with clients and houses subject matter experts that we can rely on to internally help evaluate and prioritize work to best drive the product forward.
Why Prioritization Matters
We’re not short on ideas! Our backlog of potential ways to move the product forward is so long that it’s difficult to run out of things our Development team could build. Between client feedback, new regulations, internal innovations, and changing technology, there’s always more we could build. That’s why it’s important to always keep a pulse on what we should build, why we should, and when.
When prioritization is done right, we can maximize the value to all users, deliver solutions faster, and balance value and effort to make sure that we’re getting a return for time spent.
We’re always looking to balance between immediate client requests, long-term strategic initiatives, and scalable improvements that benefit the most amount of users (even if they aren’t directly asking for them).
Our Framework
At a high level, we evaluate every potential piece of work against three main criteria:
Value to Clients
Value is not a single, defined input. It could be time saved, reduced errors, better compliance, or just improved usability.
Internally, we score Value on a 1 to 5 scale, based on how important a feature is to clients, how strongly they’re advocating for it, and how impactful it would be across segments. This is informed by user feedback, Client Success insights, and real-world usage.
Effort for Development
We’re mindful of our team’s bandwidth. If two features offer similar value but one takes half the effort, it’s likely to be prioritized first. We aim to deliver high-impact wins efficiently wherever possible.
Strategic Fit
Not everything aligns with our roadmap or mission. A feature might be valuable in a vacuum, but if it doesn’t support our broader goals or if it only serves a niche use case without broader applicability, it might not be prioritized right away. This is where we use a MoSCoW framework (Must, Should, Could, Won’t) to categorize and rank initiatives with the proper context.
Listening to Everyone
Feedback fuels our roadmap. We collect input from multiple sources, including:
- Year-end surveys where users can score and rank features.
- In-app feedback submissions.
- Ongoing conversations between Client Success and our customers.
- Roundtable discussions with client groups in key states.
If someone is logging in every day, they’re a stakeholder in our product’s success. When we gather that feedback, we don’t just treat it as raw data, we interpret it through the lens of scalability. A pain point for one client might be a symptom of a wider issue, and fixing it could unlock value for dozens of others. That’s how we scale insights into strategy.
Adapting in Real-Time
Roadmaps are living documents. At the start of the year, we create a high-level plan that takes major initiatives into quarterly themes. This helps ensure balance, we don’t want to get tunnel vision or spend too many Dev hours in one area while ignoring others.
Throughout the year, we stay flexible. If the market shifts, if new regulations emerge, or if a major client or market need surfaces, we re-evaluate. We’re not afraid to move things around.
Being responsive is part of being responsible.
We also run weekly stack rankings so our development team always knows what’s next. There’s never any guesswork. This clarity helps us maintain momentum and deliver consistently, while staying aligned with real-world needs.
The Human Side of Product
Behind the features, bug fixes, and the roadmap is the simple idea that we’re here to make people’s lives easier. We build tools that help agencies do more with less, navigate complex regulations, and focus on what really matters: serving children and families.
We couldn’t do any of this without the insights and passion of our users, the strength of our Client Success team, or the talent of our Developers. As the Product Owner, I have the privilege of helping guide this work and the responsibility to make sure we’re always working on what matters most.
Prioritization isn’t magic. It’s equal parts listening, strategy, flexibility, and experience.