Customer Thermometer’s product is shaped by a structured process we call Product Tank. It’s how we decide what to build, when to build it, and how we keep our roadmap honest with customer voice sits at the centre of it.

Five input streams, gathered continuously

We collect input from five distinct sources. Nothing makes it onto the roadmap without being weighed against all five.

• Vision: Our long-term product vision is the lens for every decision. What’s changed in our world that should change our thinking?
• Data: How the product is actually used. Which features are used most and least, and what’s shifted? Which APIs and reports do customers rely on? What kinds of Thermometers are being created?
• Customer: Direct customer voice. Our Magic Circle interviews, the pain points customers raise with us, themes from customer requests, and information security requirements raised by customers.
• Team: Our own team’s view from the front line. What’s creating tickets and overhead in the Ministry (our support and operations engine)? What would make customers more efficient? What backend work, infrastructure improvements and technical debt need addressing? Every function — sales, marketing, finance, operations, engineering – contributes.
• Underpin: The connective tissue. How do we best support and care for our customers, and how do we build genuinely new value for them?

From roadmap to release

Each agreed item is broken into stories, then into tasks with estimates. Related technical debt is folded into the same piece of work. Risks, estimates, and deadlines are written up and circulated to stakeholders, with regular progress updates while development is underway. Every change is tested locally, through automated pipelines, then on staging, then by our test resource and stakeholders. Sign-off comes from the stakeholder before deployment to production and DR. We run sanity checks on production once it’s live.

If everything holds, we publish release notes: a short screencast of the new feature, an updated user guide, and a direct announcement to customers.

Want to influence what we build?

The Customer input stream is one of the most important parts of Product Tank – it’s how the things you care about get prioritised. If you’d like to hear more about what’s on the Roadmap and Radar right now, or share what would make Customer Thermometer more valuable for your team, submit your email below and we’ll walk you through it.