In this solo morning update, Ryan Shank of PhoneWagon explains how his team decides which product features, bug fixes, and enhancements to work on. He emphasizes ranking work by the financial impact and urgency for existing customers—high‑value, deal‑breaker issues get top priority, while low‑value, non‑critical requests are lower on the list. He illustrates the process with a concrete example: a customer needed longer SMS messages than the platform allowed, so the team quickly raised the character limit from 160 to about 300, requiring a code change and a new release. Ryan also stresses the importance of transparent communication and never over‑promising delivery dates, as missed deadlines increase churn risk. He draws parallels to service‑based businesses, comparing software bug triage to deciding whether to fix a small job or chase a large commercial contract. The video ends with a motivational note about upcoming growth and a teaser for the next day’s update.
Chapters
What up guys, this is Ryan from PhoneWagon. Here we are, day 26 with our morning updates. As you can see, we are in our winter office, as people would say. So anyway, what I wanted to— and there's no coffee today, huge, huge, huge change-up, but you know, the show has to go on. As you can see, the show is always going on. So what we're going over today that we're gonna talk about is prioritizing features, bug fixes, and product enhancements and things like that. So one thing that, you know, we're starting to get a lot of, and I've talked about this in another video, but we're starting to get a lot of feedback on, you know, "Hey, you should, you know, build this feature, build this feature." "Hey, I'm using the product like this and I need this to happen." Almost like there's a bug. So for instance, one of our customers, they send out text messages to all of their prospects, and I'm gonna talk about this. In more deep, in more depth about text messaging in just a second. But anyway, this customer sends out text messages to all of their prospects when they're booking appointments and stuff, sort of like a confirmation. And I guess the templated text message is about 3 sentences long, and we had in our system a restriction so that you couldn't send more than 160 characters in a single message at a time. And, and that was prohibiting her from sending exactly what she needed. So it was like, hey, you know, I can't send more than this. Anyways, super easy fix. We just increased the number of characters from 160 to 300 something like that, and then it was fixed. But the point was, you know, our developer, you know, had to stop what he was doing. He had to go and he had to like update the code, push out a new release and things like that. Whereas a lot of times, you know, you're going to get, you know, especially once you start to get a ton of customers, you're going to get a lot of feedback. One, it's going to be just product feature recommendations, but then the other thing is it's going to be bug fixes. So it's going to be deal breakers, showstoppers, where your current existing customers that your monthly and your revenue is dependent on is at risk or at high risk. So you're going to have to be able to, one, list out all these features, prioritize them, and then figure out exactly what you're going to work on at what time, and then get them into some type of queue. And then the other thing is you don't want to overpromise on any dates. It's really important to manage expectations. So that's the other thing you have to do is show them that, hey, this is, you know, incredibly important to us. Be transparent, but then also manage expectations properly, because if you tell them a date and you don't hit that date, that's not going to be a good thing, and that's going to increase the risk of them leaving and churning out, and that's going to be a really bad thing. So being transparent but also prioritizing, you know, it's like if it's one customer paying $9 a month or $20 a month and the deal and the feature or the bug isn't even a deal breaker, like, you're probably not going to prioritize that really high, whereas You know, if you have someone that is paying, you know, hundreds or thousands of dollars a month and something is a deal breaker for them, I mean, that has to be top, top, top priority. Because by the way, it is always cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new customer, especially if you have that existing paying customer past a certain, you know, if they have been using your product for a certain number of months, so they are, you know, down the retention curve to where you know they are statistically going to retain at a pretty high clip. So it is really important to keep that customer on board. That's the thing to think about, and again, you can apply that to small businesses as well, to brick and mortar, and you know, just basically getting customer feedback, and then it's like, for instance, if you're a painting company and they say, "Hey, you know, you need to come back and fix this." One, you probably do, but you also need to prioritize. Like, are you going to give away an appointment to go back and fix a job where you like missed something, maybe like around an electrical outlet, over going out and giving an estimate for a $100,000 commercial job that could then snowball into a bunch of other jobs? You're probably not going to give up that appointment. Appointment slot. So you're going to need to prioritize when you go out and do these things. Now I'm just trying to kind of compare bug fixes with software products to more like service-based businesses as well. But there is a very relevant and applicable comparison. So that's what I've been thinking about and going over. Hope you guys have an amazing week. We have an awesome week. We're going to be plowing through. We're getting a lot of new customers coming on board and We've been following up even though we're in Palm Beach right now. So, hope you guys have an awesome week. Day 27 morning update coming out tomorrow. Have a good one.
