How Savio Works

We think that it's important to make product prioritization decisions based on strategic imperatives with a deep grounding in customer feedback.

Savio gives you a way to make evidence-based roadmap decisions built on an ironclad system for collecting and managing customer feedback. With that system in place, you'll be able to tie feedback directly to your product roadmap. Here's how it works.

Savio helps Product and customer-facing teams like Sales, Success, and Support do five things:

Centralize and organize product feedback
Analyze and prioritize feature requests
Create and share product plans with stakeholders
Update status from your dev tool
Close the feedback loop

Quick Mental Model

Product feedback is logged to Savio from where you receive it (CRM, Support Tool, Notes tool, etc). It usually describes a problem the customer has, in the customer’s own words.

For example, here’s product feedback that’s been logged to Savio:

Your team links new Feedback to a Feature Request when Feedback gets logged:

A Feature Request is how you might describe the solution to the customer problem.

Feedback is left by a Person, who usually has an Account. People and Accounts are imported and synced nightly from your customer source of truth (usually your CRM).

Each Person has customer data (like MRR, Customer Persona, Role, Plan, etc) that’s also imported from your source of truth. This data can be used to prioritize your Feature Requests.

Centralize and Organize Product Feedback

Savio centralizes product feedback through several means:

Native integrations with support tools and CRMs
A Chrome Extension to log feedback from other web-based tools
A Slack integration
Forwarding email to Savio
An API
A Zapier integration
A customer-facing voting portal

Once you log Feedback, you link it to a parent Feature Request.

For example, let’s log some feedback with the Chrome Extension.

Here’s some product feedback that you might log in Savio:

You open the Chrome Extension, paste in the feedback, and file in the appropriate details:

James Smith appears in the Chrome Extension because that list is populated with contacts and accounts that Savio imported from a customer source of truth (see below for more). Savio syncs the list at least nightly.

Similarly, the list of Feature Requests in the Chrome Extension is populated from your list of Feature Requests in Savio.

So this Zapier Integration Feature Request in the Chrome Extension...

... is pulled from Savio:

Linking product feedback to a Feature Request is crucial. That’s because linking helps you organize what can be an unwieldy paragraphs of feedback by grouping it under a parent feature described by just a few words.

When you hit Save Feedback in the Chrome Extension, your feedback is logged to Savio.

Here’s what the Feature Request looks like inside Savio. Notice the Request at the top of the list—that’s the one from James Smith that we just logged:

We can see the verbatim Product Feedback that was logged, along with the Requester’s name, account, and other customer data:

Enriching Requester Info

Wondering how you can assign feedback and requests to people from your CRM or Support Tool?

Here’s how: when you connect Savio to your CRM or Support Tool, Savio pulls in your Contacts and Accounts. It also pulls in customer data from there (like MRR, Plan, etc). Data is automatically synced nightly from your source of truth.

So when you log feedback, you specify who gave you the feedback from a list of people pulled from your customer source of truth:

Savio then counts the person as a requester of the Feature Request:

Even better—Savio rolls up the person’s MRR (and other revenue metrics) to the Feature Request:

And you can use that revenue data (and other customer data) to filter your list of Requests:

Analyze and prioritize feature requests

Now that your product feedback is centralized and organized into feature requests, you can analyze your feedback, and prioritize the high ROI feature requests to build.

Analyzing Feature Requests

In the analysis phase, your goal is to cut your large list of feature requests down to a smaller list that you'll prioritize from. Savio provides quick access to sort and filter your list of feature requests to help with this.

Let's cover the main ones.

You can sort feature requests by the total number of requests for a Feature:

Or by cumulative revenue:

Or other cumulative revenue numbers imported from your CRM:

You can also segment feature requests with data like…

Requests received between two dates:

By Importance to the Customer:

By Customer Lifecycle Stage:

Or by Product and Product Area:

One area where Savio shines is that you can filter by customer data imported from your CRM, like MRR, Plan, Opportunity Revenue, or any other customer data you care about:

You can also filter requests to see those from a specific user or account, and many more.

Changing Feature Requst status

During the analysis phase, you can change a feature request's status to "Under Consideration" to build your smaller list to prioritize from.

under consideration

See all feedback for a feature request

This is the money page. On it, you can see:

All the feedback that’s been linked to the Feature
Who left it, and what their Account is
Other context about the feedback (Customer Data, Importance to Customer, Customer Journey Stage, Product and Product Area)

This page helps you understand the scope of the customer problem, so you can build an appropriate and cost-effective solution.

Prioritizing Feature Requests

After you’ve analyzed your feedback and Feature Requests, deciding what to build becomes much easier. Here’s an example of how you could prioritize your feature requests:

Identify your business goal
Determine your dev budget
Figure out how much of your dev budget will be new features, tech debt, and strategic initiatives
Then use your "new feature" dev budget on the highest-impact features to help you accomplish your goals

For example, imagine your goal for the quarter is to reduce churn and you determine new customer features will be 50% of your dev budget. In Savio you'd:

Filter for feature requests from churned customers
Sort by MRR

You'd have a list of feature requests from churned customers, ordered by cumulative MRR of the requesting customers. You'd then allocate your dev budget by picking features from this list.

Once you’ve decided on the Features you think make sense to build, you can do two things:

1. Set each feature's status to Planned (or whatever makes sense—you can customize these)

Setting status helps you track where Features are in your pipeline. Later on, you can link these Planned features to tickets in your dev tool. When you do this, the dev tool will automatically update the Feature Request status as a dev issue moves through your engineering workflow (see below for more).

2. Put them on a Roadmap to get buy-in from stakeholders

Create and Share product plans

With Savio, you put Features on Roadmaps, and share those Roadmaps with stakeholders to get buy-in on your product plans.

The first step is to create a Roadmap and add some columns:

When that’s done you can add Features to your Roadmap:

Getting buy-in on your Roadmap

When you walk your stakeholders through your Roadmap, you probably want to just open the Roadmap and talk through each item on it.

Each Roadmap item is backed by customer evidence (like number of requests, cumulative revenue metrics, and customer verbatims). Which means you have all the customer data at your fingertips to back up your product plans.

At any point during the conversation you can drill into a Feature to talk hard data:

How many people have asked for this Feature?
Which accounts have asked for it?
What’s the associated revenue for the Feature?
Is it a must-have or nice to have?

This linkage between Roadmap item and the underlying customer feedback makes stakeholder conversations much smoother.

Sharing Roadmaps with Stakeholders

You can also share a Roadmap with stakeholders by sending them a unique URL for each Roadmap:

Stakeholders do not need an account to view the Roadmap.

You can control what stakeholders see when they click your shared Roadmap URL:

When Stakeholders view your shared Roadmap they see the Kanban board that reflects the sharing options you chose. They aren’t able to drill into the Feature Request page that shows all the customer feedback.

In this case the shared Roadmap is displaying each Feature’s number of requests, cumulative MRR, and the request’s Product and Product Area:

Update status from dev tool

Once your Roadmap has been signed off on, your dev tool can automatically update the status of the Savio Feature Request (see supported issue trackers here).

To do that you create or link to a dev tool issue from inside Savio:

When you link an issue to a Savio feature, the feature’s status will update automatically based on the mappings between Issue States and Feature Request Status:

Watch this in action:

You can now rest easy knowing that each linked Savio Feature will have its status updated automatically as your devs work their magic.

You can also see the status of all linked dev tool issues inside of Savio:

Close the loop

Once you’ve shipped features customers have asked for, you can send them a quick personalized email through Savio.

Look for features that have been marked as Shipped (or whatever stage is relevant):

To close the loop, select the people to contact and either copy their email addresses to your clipboard to email them from your email client, or hit “Compose email” to email them from Savio: