Company Context

RouteFlow is a Series B logistics SaaS company that helps mid-sized retailers manage same-day delivery across 40 US cities. The product serves 1,200 business customers and generates revenue through annual software contracts plus usage-based delivery orchestration fees.

Problem

RouteFlow's product team is under pressure to improve merchant retention after several high-profile feature launches underperformed. In the last two quarters, three roadmap bets were delayed or lightly adopted because they depended on warehouse workflows, driver behavior, and support processes that were not validated early. One example: a "smart rerouting" feature promised a 12% reduction in failed deliveries, but only 18% of merchants enabled it because dispatch teams found the setup too complex and operations managers worried about SLA risk.

The Chief Product Officer wants a repeatable approach to ensure product recommendations are grounded in operational reality before committing roadmap resources. You are the PM for Delivery Operations. Your task is not just to suggest better research, but to define how product decisions should incorporate frontline constraints, process readiness, and implementation feasibility.

Deliverables

1. Define how you would evaluate whether a product recommendation is operationally realistic before prioritizing it.
2. Identify the users and operational stakeholders you would involve, and what you would need to learn from each.
3. Propose a decision-making process for moving from idea to MVP to broader rollout.
4. Recommend what types of solutions or features you would prioritize first, and which ideas you would defer.
5. Define success metrics that show both product value and operational viability.

Constraints

• You have one product analyst, one designer, and a shared engineering squad of 6 engineers.
• Leadership expects an MVP recommendation within 6 weeks.
• You cannot require major changes to merchant warehouse hardware or driver mobile devices in the first release.
• Any solution that increases average dispatch handling time by more than 30 seconds will likely be rejected by customers.
• Sales has already pre-sold "operational intelligence" improvements to several enterprise accounts, so leadership wants visible progress this quarter.