Product teams love talking about roadmaps and features. They spend weeks debating priorities and arguing over what to build next. But here’s what actually works: stop guessing and start listening. Adam Root, Chief Product Officer, Founder, and host of two podcasts for product leaders, took a hospitality SaaS platform from zero to 50% compounding annual growth in five months by doing exactly that.
Start with the Customer’s Struggle, Not Your Roadmap
Root’s team didn’t stumble into success. “We didn’t get there by luck. We got there by doing one thing really well: listening to customers and letting their unmet needs shape our product vision,” he says. Simple concept. Hard to execute. Here’s where most teams go wrong. They build products for made-up buyer personas, theoretical users who exist only in planning documents. “Too many teams build for personas. I build for pain,” Root explains. His approach meant getting out of the office and into customers’ actual workflows. They mapped user journeys and watched real people struggle through their daily tasks. The breakthrough came from watching what users were actually doing. Customers had built elaborate spreadsheet systems to track things the platform should have handled. That workaround wasn’t just interesting. It was a roadmap written by the people who mattered most. Genuine problems, clear urgency, strong adoption potential.
Align Product UX and Engineering Around One Narrative
Cross-functional alignment sounds great in theory. In practice, it usually means endless meetings and Jira tickets that nobody reads. Root threw out that playbook. His team rallied around one question: “How do we save two hours a day for a busy front desk manager?” That simple story changed everything. “I unified our teams with a single customer-centered narrative,” he says. Engineers stopped thinking about code and started thinking about solutions. Designers stopped making assumptions and started building with real empathy. The whole team knew exactly what winning looked like.
Obsess Over Signals, Not Just Metrics
Most companies drown in metrics. Dashboards full of numbers that look impressive but don’t tell you much. He watches for different signals. “Growth isn’t about big dashboards, it’s about small signals,” he points out. One month in, something interesting happened. Users weren’t just setting up the platform faster. They were bringing their colleagues onto it without being asked. Net Promoter Score jumped from 40 to 70 in weeks. Those weren’t just good numbers. They were proof that customers actually wanted what his team had built.
The typical SaaS playbook pushes companies to chase features and match competitors. Root’s team ignored all that. “Driving 50% compounding annual growth isn’t about chasing features, it’s about anchoring your vision in a customer’s lived experience,” he explains. The difference shows up in retention and referrals, not just sign-ups. His advice for other founders comes down to reversing the usual process. “Let your users write the first draft of your roadmap. Then lead your team to edit it into something unforgettable,” he says. Build things customers would fight to keep, not things that check boxes on a product spec. Five months. 50% compounding annual growth. A product that users actively recommend. Root’s team got there by staying focused on customer struggles instead of internal debates about features and priorities.
Connect with Adam Root on LinkedIn to explore more insights on product-led growth.
