Running a public roadmap your merchants vote on

When a merchant requests a feature, they are telling you they care enough about your app to want it to be better. A public roadmap turns that signal into a retention loop: they suggest, they vote, you ship, they stay. Done badly, it becomes a graveyard of ignored ideas. Here is how to do it well.

Let merchants vote, not just submit

A list of requests is noise. A list of requests with votes is a prioritized backlog built by the people paying you. Voting tells you what to build next and gives merchants a sense of ownership. The ones who vote and see their idea ship are the ones who renew.

Close the loop when you ship

The single biggest mistake teams make is shipping a requested feature and never telling the people who asked. Email the voters when their idea goes live. That one message does more for loyalty than a month of marketing, because it proves you listened.

Convot’s roadmap and changelog do this with one click: merchants vote on the roadmap, and when the request ships, the voters get an email. It is a Canny alternative that lives inside the same widget as your support, so merchants vote where they already chat with you.

Tie votes to revenue

Not all votes are equal. A feature requested by three merchants paying you $200 a month is a different priority from one requested by thirty free-tier testers. When your roadmap is connected to your revenue data, you can see the MRR behind each request and prioritize the revenue, not just the vote count.

Keep it honest

A roadmap is a promise, so do not over-promise. Use a small number of public columns, under consideration, planned, shipped, and move things deliberately. Merchants forgive a slow roadmap. They do not forgive a roadmap full of “planned” items that never move.

Pair it with a changelog

The roadmap shows what is coming; the changelog shows what shipped. Together they tell a merchant your app is alive and improving, which is one of the quietest but strongest retention signals there is.

A public roadmap is not a vanity feature. It is a structured way to let your best merchants tell you how to keep them.

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