"What are you currently working on? What is next on the agenda?" These are common questions that are asked by our users. The answers can be found on our roadmap. However, you are still not getting a specific answer from us. What is the reason for that?

In this article, I will tell you more about how we determine our roadmap within Salonized. I hope to give you more insight into what this process looks like and what it involves exactly.

What can be found on the roadmap?

Deciding what to work on (and what not to work on) is one of the hardest things for a company like Salonized. You have to deal with opportunities, threats, interests and the size of the team is limited.

At Salonized the planning is mainly divided into three subjects:

1. Fixing bugs and technical system maintenance
2. New or improved functionalities that arise from strategy and own insight
3. Requests from users, which we collect and monitor in our idea box

Fixing bugs and technical work

We are constantly developing. That is how we keep renewing our product. Unfortunately, it also means that sometimes we break something in the programme. How can this happen? When we develop something new, we thoroughly test everything. We also write automated tests for all kinds of scenarios. But sometimes something manages to slip through our fingers and a bug gets into the system.

We are also rapidly growing, which means that more and more users are active at the same time. To prevent some systems from unintentionally slowing down as a result, we have to carry out continuous technical maintenance and, of course, keep track of the security updates.

New or improved functionalities resulting from strategy

We have big ambitions and want to continue growing. We think a lot about new innovative ways to help our customers and to make their work easier and more effective. We also work on features or extensions in order to attract a larger market. We call this kind of development strategic development. We spend about half of our available development time on this.

Requests from our users

The feedback and ideas of our users are very valuable to us. We look at the feedback customers leave in our suggestion box on a daily basis. Unfortunately, we cannot develop everything. Sometimes an idea is simply too much work, too complex or it is not within our strategy. On the other hand, sometimes it may seem like an idea would only take a few days to develop, but due to the complexity of our system, this is often not the case. Many features take up weeks or even months of work. Therefore, we have to make very selective choices. As a result, we are not always able to develop all of the ideas and sometimes we have to disappoint customers because of it. Nevertheless, all users combined have a lot of influence on our roadmap. By listening to our users we get to know exactly what it is that you need. Practice has shown that "the crowd" automatically ensures that the important requests or problems are brought to light. On the other hand, we can unfortunately do very little for individual requests.

Publishing the roadmap

We deliberately choose not to publish our roadmap. We do this because the roadmap is constantly changing. For example, when a function turns out to take up more time than what was initially planned. Or when we decide to respond to a change in the market such as a new legislation or developments. When publishing a roadmap, expectations are created among customers. But we cannot always stick to the planned roadmap: software development is an unpredictable process and we do not want to disappoint our users' expectations. Plus, it is always nice to be able to surprise you.

I hope that this has given some insight into how our roadmap is determined. A process that is always evolving. Just like our product!