As you’ve seen from our recent press and newsletters, Recurly is going through a significant growth period, both in terms of customers and internal employees. The product team is 5x this year what it was last year, which has allowed us to dive deep on some of the features we need to build as well as some of the challenges our users are facing. As the team grows, it’s important to make sure we all stay closely aligned on the “why” behind features we add to the product. We sat down recently to put together a list of the most important factors that go into building our roadmap and the specific details that lead to the implementation of these features. While the list is long, I pulled out a few of the items I think play the most critical role in the question we ask ourselves regularly: “How do we know what to build?”

Customer Requests and Feedback

These are two separate and distinct areas of input, but I’ve grouped them together and listed them first for a reason: There are few things as critical as the feedback from your customers when thinking about what you’re going to build. We treat customer requests very seriously. In fact, we have a dedicated repo in Github and where we track each request. This enables us to view the most requested features with a few clicks. The product team spends dedicated time every week looking through these with the support team and reading through the requests to help prioritize these items. Want to learn more? Read a note from our Director of Customer support

Current and Future Market Conditions

As we know, the payments landscape is ever evolving. As a result, we have to be nimble in our roadmap. With legislations being passed for sales tax, the reversal of the Durbin Amendment, changes in VAT laws, etc, there’s no way we can set in stone what we want to build a year from now, as the conditions will change. We need to stay current and make sure that the features we build apply to the landscape in billing and payments today, but are flexible to meet tomorrow’s demands.

Vision

People often ask us why we don’t do feature x or feature y. For us, the key is making sure that each feature we roll out is aligned with our vision for the product. We aim to be the most elegant recurring billing solution available. We look to accomplish this through design, usability, feature delivery, and reduced complexity. This sometimes means saying “no” to things that others in our space may say “yes” to, allowing us to focus on the features that matter most. As our team grows we’re able to execute on a larger number of more complex features, but we do still keep a close eye on how these features play into the bigger picture of what we want Recurly to be.

What are some of the things you think about as you build your product or business? Do you see these as being key areas of focus and input as you grow your company? We’d love to hear from you!