The problem with building a successful product is hardly ever a lack of ideas for features. The real struggle is deciding which features to implement and in what order. Prioritizing tasks, features, and other product requirements can make or break the success of a product.
I know a lot of Product Managers that have a great gut instinct about what features to prioritize but struggle to validate them for their stakeholders. Their team's time and resources are limited and deciding what features deserve their attention first and foremost can be very difficult.
That’s why I decided to sum up a few ways to gather data for validating this instinct, as well as tools and frameworks to work with.
How not to prioritize
There are a lot of methods out there on prioritizing and still, many people rely on the wrong ways to go on with it. So, here are a few Don’ts when it comes to prioritization:
- Sales Requests: Your colleagues in Sales and Support are indubitable the ones with the most direct customer contact. They talk with and listen to them every day. If they hear a complaint, they will let you know. Don’t get me wrong, customer feedback is extremely important when it comes to prioritization, however, listening to the loudest noises will only offer you individual requests. Always check if you can find a trend and more customers have the same issue before blindly building a hand-weaved feature that takes up all your resources.
- Personal Experience: We all know at love it. Someone in your company, maybe even an important stakeholder, just used your product and saw something they didn’t like. Don’t let that personal experience disrupt your roadmap unless you can validate it with data.
- Eyes on the wrong prize: It can be so tempting to build new features with the promise of more revenue. But keep in mind that even if a feature guarantees short-term income, it doesn’t always pay off in the long run. Keeping customers for a long time and offering a great user experience is what brings the most success in the long run.
Where to get your data from
To start prioritizing features you need data on what features are even up for discussion. In case you don’t yet know where to get this data from, here are the two main sources of useful information.
Ask your customers
Product Managers sometimes think they are the ones who know their product best. While this might be true, they are not the ones who have to use it on a regular basis. A great way to gather insights about what features to build next is by simply asking your customers. After all, they are the ones using your product. Asking them for feedback can be done in multiple ways. There are tools that help you with creating a survey, like Typeform or if you are looking to offer your customers a shared platform to voice their requests, there are product feedback tools, like Userwell, to help you with that. Or you can choose not to use a tool and send out an email, asking for your customers' opinions.
Either way, collect all your gathered feedback in one central. To start your prioritization process, review the submissions and requests and make sure they align with your product vision. If you approve of the feature request, you can add it to your product backlog.
Organize your feature backlog
Your product backlog serves as an inventory of features. Some companies use email, spreadsheets, and/or dev tools to gather their ideas for features. Not having a process in place and collecting feedback everywhere just as you go will need a lot of resources in the long run.
Before you start prioritizing your features, you should organize your backlog. This can, for example, be done by themes. Themes help you to break your features into smaller, high-level groups. Another way to organize is by grouping your features by their source.
Product Prioritization Tools and Frameworks
Now that you have gathered all the feature requests and made sure they align with our product strategy. We have organized our product backlog and are now ready to prioritize.
While it can be very exciting to decide what path your product will go down in the future, it is also a very big decision.
Luckily, there are many product prioritization frameworks and tools that product managers and business leaders can use to make sure they’re taking all features and goals into account.
Here are a few of the most commonly-used ones:
Impact/Effort Matrix
A prioritization matrix is a useful tool to map each backlog item into a table with certain criteria. It is a very easy-to-use tool that you can use to group your tasks into different priority levels.
The impact/effort matrix is a 2x2 matrix that evaluates each task by comparing the value it generates for your business (impact) against the cost of implementing it (effort). By doing so, you get four quadrants:
- Quick Wins: These are the top priority tasks. They take little effort to work on but offer a lot of value.
- Major Projects: These tasks also deliver a lot of impact. However, they take a lot of time to execute. They, therefore, require strategic planning.
- Fill-ins: Even though these tasks don’t require a lot of effort, they also don’t have a lot of impact. They can therefore be put on the lower end of your prioritization list.
- Thankless Tasks: Last on the list should be these tasks. They demand a high effort but cause a low impact.
RICE Method
While the Impact/Effort Matrix is a very simple way to prioritize your features, you will find that it sometimes won’t be sufficient enough – especially when it comes to more complicated features. This is where the RICE Method comes in. It helps you to score priorities.
RICE is an acronym and stands for:
- Reach: How many people will your project affect? (i.e. subscribers per month, transactions per quarter)
- Impact: How much will this affect the individual customer? (3 for massive impact, 2 for high impact, 1 for medium impact, 0.5 for low impact, and 0.25 for minimal impact)
- Confidence: How sure are you of your estimates? (100% for high, 80% for medium, and 50% for low confidence; is the confidence <50% you should probably reconsider the feature)
- Effort: How much work will this project take? (The standard unit is person-months, which is how much work one team member can do in a month)
The RICE Score:
As soon as you have determined all four factors you can calculate the RICE score by using this formula:
(R x I x C) / E = RICE Score
Once you have calculated the total impact per time worked for all the features you want to prioritize, you can sort them from lowest to highest. This will help you get an idea of what features to prioritize.
Kano Model
Your main objective in Product Management is to create a product that your customers love to use. The Kano Model aims to fulfill this exact goal. It prioritizes features that lead to customer satisfaction or user delight.
The Kano model breaks feature requests down into four categories and their emotional responses.
- Basic Needs: These are the features that fulfill the bare minimum of what a customer expects from a product. Even though they don’t affect customer satisfaction if they’re included, they cause a lot of dissatisfaction if left out.
- Attractive Needs: These are features that can have a huge positive impact on user satisfaction if they’re included. However, if they’re not there, customers may not even notice it.
- Performance Needs: Those have a linear relationship with the satisfaction of customers. The more of them you provide, the greater is the satisfaction, but equally, the less you have, the less delighted your customers will be.
- Indifferent: These are features that don’t have a meaningful impact on customer satisfaction.
Talk to a group of customers and ask them how they would feel if the feature was or was not present to understand where your features sit on the curve. If you are looking to deep-dive into the Kano Model, check out this article by Jan Moorman.
If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent
Prioritization is a necessary part of task management. While some of us would probably love to implement as many features as possible, we also know why that is not a good idea. Without prioritization we might spend resources on tasks that won’t pay of, or in a worst-case scenario, can be the downfall of our product.
While there is no one single best prioritization method, there are some things you should always keep in mind. Select the right prioritization tool based on your business goals, keep your product strategy in mind and listen to your customers. This way you will prioritize and later implement features that your users really need.
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