An updated roadmap that reflects how we’re building Hotjar 🗺️
Since the early days of Hotjar, we have committed to maintaining a public product roadmap to let our customers know what we’ve added to our software and what’s coming down the line. One of our core values is building trust with transparency and we believe in communicating with our users in a clear and open way. All that said, our public product roadmap wasn't really been living up to its promise.
The old roadmap format was no longer reflective of how we’re building Hotjar and, therefore, no longer giving our users a realistic view of where we’re headed. So, we've given our public product roadmap an overhaul. You can see the updated roadmap HERE.
What’s New
The first thing you’ll notice (apart from the fact that it’s now in Trello) is that our updated roadmap format groups new feature releases and improvements by the different tools within Hotjar. So, if you’re a big user of our Recordings tool, for example, you can jump straight to the latest features we've added to Recordings and also see what the future direction is for that particular tool.
The term ‘future direction’ is important here. Like many modern software companies, we don’t work in a way that commits us to specific features and release dates. The truth is that we are constantly discovering which features we will release in the future. We know where we’re headed, but we follow an agile process to explore the different routes to get there and pick the best one. This embodies another one of our core values: be bold and move fast.
How We Work
We are very clear on the destination, our vision is to give teams of all sizes the insights they need to create experiences their users love. We also have several desired outcomes that we know we need to achieve in order to get there - things like helping users get to their most relevant insights more quickly. These, in turn, allow us to identify various opportunities that will contribute to that desired outcome.
An opportunity for the desired outcome stated above might be to make it easier for users to find their most relevant recordings. To make that happen, we come up with a number of ideas, like enabling users to filter their recordings by custom user attributes. We prioritize these ideas and run experiments with small groups of users to understand if they significantly contribute to the desired outcome.
If an experiment proves successful, it becomes a new feature that we make available to all of our users, in the confidence that it will be of value to them. However, we can’t put the feature on our roadmap before this point because it’s still just an idea that hasn’t been validated by real users. For this reason, what we share in our updated roadmap are the features we have already released through this process, and the opportunities we are actively working on. In our roadmap, we call these opportunities our ‘future direction’.
You can check out the updated roadmap HERE and, as always, suggest your ideas HERE.
