Steering the Braze Product Roadmap

As one of the senior members of the Product team here at Braze, I hear a lot of questions from prospects, customers, and partners alike about our platform. One of the questions I get asked the most frequently is how Braze—and the Product team specifically—approaches product development. Often, that question comes from potential customers who are looking to better understand:

• What the future evolution of the Braze product will look like
• How my organization decides what features and functionality gets added to the product
• Whether the requests they make—or plan to make—can be prioritized

Whether they think about it in these terms or not, what they’re really doing is asking about our product roadmap and how we manage it. So, today I wanted to take a minute to discuss how industry expertise and customer feedback shape the way we build Braze for the future.

How does Braze approach product development?

At Braze, our overall product roadmap is informed by an internal vision that informs how we want our platform to develop and change over the next three to five years. That vision is set by Braze Chief Product Officer Kevin Wang, in consultation with other leaders and key stakeholders, and is informed by our internal technical expertise, industry-specific insights, and market research. We call it our Braze multi-year product vision and what it does is give our Product, Design, and Engineering teams a north star when it comes to the overall direction we want things to travel.

Then, alongside OUR vision, we take into account YOUR feedback. Braze has a framework for gathering, assessing, and prioritizing customer development requests, which allows us to further enhance the product based on real-life use cases, customer needs, and user experience feedback.

Beyond those two core factors, we also make a point of budgeting time to respond to emerging trends that might crop up over the course of a given quarter or year. The Braze Product, Design, and Engineering organization is an Agile shop, so it’s important that we give ourselves room to adjust when priorities or areas of focus change unexpectedly.

This multi-pronged, disciplined approach to product development keeps our team focused on delivering the biggest benefits to the largest number of customers. Plus, it also reduces the risk of diluting the power of our core functionality by adding too many niche customizations.

Why is a product roadmap so important?

There’s a reason that basically any reputable technology company has a product roadmap: Because it helps everyone in the Product, Design, and Engineering organization focus on the big picture and make it easier for them to evolve their product in ways that are coherent and valuable.

At Braze, our customers, partners, and developers are all key stakeholders in our platform’s future. And because of that, everyone has an opinion—or many opinions—about the best path forward and what our north star should be. It’s great that the Braze platform can inspire such passion and thought from so many different organizations and stakeholders; at the same time, if we tried to follow every idea and opportunity that was placed in front of us, we’d be pulled in a hundred different directions. Instead of implementing a core number of impactful enhancements over a given time period, we’d likely end up creating an incoherent functional footprint and a frustrating UX.

That’s why we need a product roadmap. To align all those stakeholders when it comes to the direction we’re traveling in. To keep the product moving forward, toward bigger and better things. And to ensure that we’re adding meaningful value for our users and their end users. Without that organizing principle, we’d run the risk of just rewarding whatever voices happened to shout the loudest…and that just doesn’t work.

Reactive product development: A cautionary tale

In a previous life, I worked in exactly that kind of business—that is, at a company where the squeaky wheel always got the grease. We had hundreds of different clients, but around a dozen big-hitters in that group actually called the shots when it came to product development. The result? Instead of steering our own course and strategically developing a coherent product, we responded to their needs reactively, even when it didn’t serve the technology as a whole. After a while, adding niche request after niche request resulted in a Frankenstein’s monster of a product.

The outcome mostly satisfied those core customers. But the incoherent jumble of functionality that results left most of our other customers confused and frustrated. We kept a handful of major clients but—because we lost sight of what our product was actually supposed to do—we lost the rest.

That’s not how it works at Braze. Our product roadmap and the process we’ve developed for adjusting and refining it keeps us focused and aligned on the core use case for our platform, so we can be confident that we’re adding more value for more users over time.

Understanding the Braze product roadmap management process

Now that we’ve walked through why it’s so important to have a product roadmap and how we approach our product roadmap here at Braze, the next thing we need to cover is what the process of managing it looks like. The core question there is: How do we incorporate different pieces of feedback and inputs to improve our product?

Combining top-down vision with bottom-up innovation

When Kevin, our chief product officer, is developing and updating his multi-year product vision, one thing he does is keep a watchful eye on the market and how it’s poised to develop—from marketing trends to tech advances—so that we can assess each potential opportunity and decide whether to incorporate them into our roadmap. In recent years, that led us to build out advanced automation capabilities well in advance of the current AI boom and to add in-platform support for WhatsApp as an engagement channel.

At the same time, Kevin’s top-down approach is only one part of the equation. We also see significant innovation coming from our very talented teams of developers. They’re at the cutting edge of what customer engagement technology can do, so it’s important that we listen to their eyes and make sure the best ones can make their way into the mix. The results can be significant—like when one of engineers came up with an outside of the box way to more easily deprecate RequireJS and modernize our front end stack.

Finally, our UX team members are constantly evaluating the dashboard and measuring it against established UX Heuristics. Based on any gaps observed and measured against customer support feedback, there is advocacy for addressing UX pain points.

Incorporating customer requests and feedback

Customer inputs are the other essential part of the process. And, understandably, it’s this aspect of how we manage our product roadmap that prospective and existing customers tend to be the most interested in. At the core, they tend to be wondering if their feedback can actually influence product development, and whether it’s worth speaking up. To that, I say a resounding YES.

Most customer feedback on the Braze platform reaches my organization through our Customer Success and Global Technical Support teams. That can be everything from customization requests (i.e. your big ideas on what new features we should add to Braze) to complaints (i.e. the pain points that you really want us to address). We typically get about 4,000 customer inputs a year and we’ve got around 30 product managers who deal directly with this sort of customer feedback. To help us make sense out of all the data that’s coming our way, we take advantage of a platform called ProductBoard. (What else would you expect from a company that helps its customers listen to understand, and act on data to improve THEIR customers’ experiences?)

ProductBoard helps us spot trends in what our customers are asking for, so it’s easier to tell if a piece of feedback is a one-off request that really only adds value for a specific customer, or symptomatic of something that could have a much bigger impact for a lot of people. As you might expect, if a suggested change has the potential to have a significant impact on a range of customers, that’s a key thing we keep in mind.

How Braze prioritizes updates to our product roadmap

The truth is, even if we had unlimited developers, time, and money, we probably still wouldn’t implement every idea that came our way. Why? Because we know that if we want to keep the Braze platform focused and functional, we need to be very strategic about what features and functionality we do actually add.

Prioritizing customer requests

Once we’ve triaged all the best ideas for possible changes from our customers and other stakeholders, we need to sit down and prioritize them. As part of that process, we consider a lot of different factors, but three are particularly important:

• Does this align with our vision for Braze and its core use case?
• Is the payoff for customers worth the time required?
• Will this benefit the majority of our users?

If a piece of customer feedback ticks these boxes, we’ll generally start considering it and work to decide whether we should include it in our roadmap and when and how it could be added. It’s important to remember, though, that none of this happens in a vacuum; there will always be complications and potential trade-offs. If you picture our roadmap as a Kanban board filled with a range of cards, each one representing a given project, it quickly becomes clear that if we move one proposed change up, another one will almost certainly need to move down. It’s a balancing act, and one that we put a lot of thought and care into to get right.

Responding to changing priorities

As I mentioned early, here at Braze we take an Agile approach to product development, dedicating about 70% of our time to the sorts of work I’ve just walked though. Broadly speaking, that time is spent working on sprints on particular themes—for example, we recently had a major focus on ease of use and how we could uplevel it for our product. That said, every journey has detours along the way. And one of the major benefits of having a roadmap is that it helps you find alternative routes to your destination when a complication emerges.

Complications—and changes in strategy—happen. That’s why our product roadmap reserves 30% of the bandwidth for our Product, Design, and Engineering organization to handle the detours that could crop up. Maybe that’s Apple announcing major changes to iOS. Maybe third-party cookies are finally really getting deprecated. Or maybe there’s a major new advance in AI technology that we simply have to jump on to better support our customers. By reserving this capacity, we can be faster to market with the functionality our customers need to continue offering the very best cross-channel experiences to their end users. This is what allows Braze to get first-to-market countless times (see AMP for Email, direct integrations for email deliverability, etc.).

Final thoughts

At Braze, we’ve found a strong balance between proactively shaping the platform and responding positively to customer feedback.

With a flexible but disciplined approach to product development, we’re intentionally crafting a coherent, feature-rich platform that stays true to our ultimate purpose—supporting our users as they strive to be better marketers.

Thank YOU for making us a better Braze.

Forward Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze’s product roadmap strategy. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in the Braze Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 6, 2024, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.