How an agri-tech CPO replaced the loudest-call roadmap with full-season signal
At a Des Moines farm-management software company, the roadmap had a recency problem: whatever the last angry dealer call said, the roadmap did. Synthesizing a full season of grower and agronomist feedback changed the picture, and two of the quarter's top three priorities turned out to be things nobody had escalated loudly.
The situation
The CPO knew the roadmap had a recency problem and said so out loud: whatever the last angry dealer call said, the roadmap did. Feedback arrived through dealer calls, agronomist field visits, support tickets, and in-app comments, spread across a season that runs on planting and harvest windows, not quarters. Nobody had ever synthesized a full season, because by the time anyone had capacity, the next season had started.
The cost was invisible until it wasn't: the team spent a summer building an export feature three dealers had demanded on calls, while a quiet, season-long pattern of moisture-data complaints from actual growers sat unread in tickets.
The turn
The first full-season synthesis ran over two days in the off-season: 1,900 pieces of feedback from all four channels, distilled into themes weighted by frequency, revenue exposure, and who was speaking, a grower in the field counting differently from a dealer on a call. The recency bias was visible in the output: two of the top three themes, offline sync failures during planting and the moisture-data trust issue, had never been loudly escalated by anyone.
The roadmap that came out of it was the first the CPO could defend line by line. When a large dealer pushed hard for a pet feature at the winter meeting, the answer was the theme ranking with the receipts attached, and the conversation moved in one meeting from whose call was loudest to what the season's data said.
“Our roadmap used to be an echo of the last angry phone call. The season synthesis showed me the two biggest problems were ones nobody had yelled about. That is exactly the failure mode I could never see from inside it.”
How Second Axis fits
Full-season synthesis, every channel
Dealer calls, agronomist visits, tickets, and in-app feedback distill into themes across the whole season, not the last loud week.
Recency bias made visible
Themes are weighted by frequency and speaker, so a season of quiet grower complaints outranks one loud dealer call.
Season-aware continuous rollup
During planting and harvest, themes update weekly, so an offline-sync failure surfaces while the window it ruins is still open.
A roadmap with receipts
Every item links to the feedback behind it, which turned dealer negotiations from volume contests into evidence reviews.
Results
| Area | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Season-wide feedback synthesis | Never completed | 2 days |
| Roadmap items traced to source feedback | ~20% | 78% |
| Emerging-issue detection during planting | Post-season, if ever | Weekly |
| Roadmap changes driven by single loud calls | Routine | 0 last two cycles |
| Dealer feature disputes resolved with evidence | Rare | Standard, one meeting |
What came next
The moisture-data fix shipped before planting, and the support queue felt it first: complaint volume on that theme fell by more than half season over season. The CPO now opens every roadmap review with the theme ranking, and the loudest voice in the room has stopped being a prioritization method.
Company details anonymized at the customer's request.