01
Client context
Product decisions were driven by the loudest enterprise customers, and the backlog had grown to hundreds of requests with no agreed way to prioritise.
02
Business challenge
The team needed to separate frequent, costly problems from one-off requests — and understand how needs differed between individual developers and engineering leaders.
03
Research objective & questions
Build a prioritised, evidence-based map of workflow pain points to guide the next two quarters of product investment.
- Which steps in the development workflow cause the most friction and lost time?
- Which problems are teams already spending money or effort to solve?
- How do priorities differ between developers, team leads and platform teams?
- Which pains are poorly served by current tools?
04
Methodology & approach
- Contextual interviews
- Screen-share sessions observing real workflows with developers and engineering managers.
- Opportunity scoring
- Importance versus satisfaction analysis of identified pains.
- MaxDiff survey
- Prioritisation of pains across a broader developer audience.
- Competitive tool review
- How current tools address — or ignore — each pain.
05
Sample & geography
- ~24 contextual IDIs
- ~400 developer survey responses
- Geography — United States and India
06
Key findings
- The highest-priority pains sat in code review and environment setup, not in the areas generating most feature requests.
- Engineering leaders prioritised visibility and governance; individual developers prioritised speed.
- Several requested features were workarounds for one underlying problem.
- Competitors addressed setup well but left review workflows under-served.
07
Business implications
- Prioritise a review-workflow theme for the next two quarters.
- Package governance features for engineering leaders separately.
- Retire low-impact backlog items and communicate the new rationale to customers.
08
Outcome
The product team adopted an opportunity map as its prioritisation framework, giving a shared, evidence-based basis for roadmap decisions.
Example engagement — Shows how Hoog approaches this type of question. Not a specific client project. Findings are directional.