DEV Community: Karthik Kamalakannan

How to know what and when to build features for your product

Karthik Kamalakannan — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 05:12:39 +0000

It’s a typical enigma for product managers to identify user needs, analyze, and know what exactly to be built next in the product. It is one of the core responsibilities of a product manager to ensure features are usable and practicable and know the features that will achieve utility after the release.

Gathering feature requests from your users can help you build the right feature for your product. This is the place where you can get an idea of what new features can be added to the roadmap and what features would work for the end-users when released.

Pro tip: Read about analyzing feature requests effectively using a feature request tool →

Ultimately, when you’ve organized all the feature requests, you will be able to identify the user needs. As soon as you know what features to build, you need to start prioritizing the features based on the feature requests submitted by your users. This phase of product development is what many call “Feature Prioritization”.

Why feature prioritization matters

When you are a product manager, trying to prioritize hundreds of features that your users, your teams, and your potential customers have submitted, it could be one of the most daunting tasks in your career. In this article, I will try to explain in detail how can you do feature prioritization and launch effectively with the following points:

Who is a power user and who isn’t for your product?
How to define your goals for product releases?
How to categorize what features users would need?
How to know what features you should spend your engineering effort on?
What is affinity grouping and how it helps you?
How to identify the complexity of the feature before planning for a production release?
What are the prominent tools that help for prioritizing?
How to communicate clearly about the context of a feature request with the team?
What is product road mapping?
When and how to plan the product launch?
How release notes can be effectively used?

Who is a power user of your product

Most of the products serve several types of users based on their needs and goals. You can’t group all of them under a single category of using or buying your product. But you can decide your target user, which means, the group of users who plays a crucial role in the success of your product.

Target them and give preference for their feature requests, prepare a roadmap for analyzing if this feature is really worth building! It will be a wise decision to start feature prioritization and to target your potential users. This doesn’t mean you should only work for their needs, just try to fit as many features as possible into your roadmap.

How to define your goal for the release?

Before you start prioritizing the features it is important to define your goal on what you build, if you’re unsure of this, then there is a possibility of your production release expectation falling down. So, try to answer these questions before you start building the feature:

What is the most important feature request for your product that really moves the needle of the company, right now?
How about supporting existing customers?
Acquiring new customers?
Improving UX/UI version of the product?
Update the platform performance?
Is this a quarter release?
Promote customer experience/ relationship?
Improve team support?

There should be a straight forward goal for any product release, ensure you are not missing the opportunity of driving traffic to your product and your development team's time is not wasted. your answer to all of the above-mentioned questions helps you to identify the goal of the feature release before you start.

The advantage of defining your goal is that your team can achieve a specific measurable development rather than working aimlessly and unsure about what they’re building and delivering.

How to categorize what features your users would need?

Collect the most repeated feature requests by the users and sort your feature idea based on it, keep this as a routine for every quarter production release. You might get tired of spending more time checking with the feature requests. To avoid this, I would suggest you prefer the correct feature request tool that can help you in organizing the feature requests and easy to find the frequently asked feature.
This works even when you have no idea on what to build for your next quarter release, you can easily take lead from the feature requests list and start building the right ones.
By prioritizing what to build based on feature requests, it will help you to realize how quickly users are getting up to speed in your tool and get inspired. Their inspiration naturally builds the better opportunity of inviting others from their network to try your product.

How to know what features you should spend your engineering effort on?

Even after, when you are ready with the feature of what to build next, don’t hurry on taking it directly to your development team. Unless you are sure about the purpose and goal for the release. It is hard to decide about how to build the feature UI and write the whole new production code. It is highly time-consuming. So, it is better to consolidate with the customer first who needed that particular feature to be built before taking them to the development team.

Be clear in these questions before you begin working with the engineering team:

What is the need for this feature to them?
Will building this feature destroy the earlier version?
Does this feature help other users?
Do you understand the exact purpose of the customer needs?
Will this feature build give a solution for what they need?
How does this feature improve the uniqueness of the product?

Come up with definite answers!

What is affinity grouping and how it helps in prioritizing?

Affinity grouping is an activity in which a Product Manager sits down with their team to prioritize the features they are about to build for their users. Usually, the process starts by looking at their feature request tool.

Always, take the features discussion to the UI/UX designer first! It is important for you and your designers to deeply understand user needs correctly to build the right feature requests. The term customer experience has never been this important. If you miss here then it’s hard to regain customers back, so be the best at planning for customer experience. Trying to produce testing specific solution ideas to give a better user experience to do this creating a prototype model of the feature roadmap is the best endeavor and check how it is feasible before the single line of code is written.

If you find it helpful then brainstorm the feature roadmap with the entire team and plan for the release. It is a crucial role of a project manager to interact and clear the context of the launch to the entire team.

How to identify the complexity of the feature before planning for a production release?

Before understanding the problem, you’re solving, estimate the feature complexity of what you decided to release with the team. You need to undergo a product discovery to know the solution. Product discovery deals with making project decisions with the entire team, key stakeholders like marketing, sales, and support. Sync-up with the team and know what are the difficulties/roadblocks they’re facing while building the feature and at the same time how they can manage the time on developing a particular feature.

So, it will be easy for you to lead the product release and to understand every nook and corner of the launch. Sometimes instead of building an overly complex feature, it’s better to build a simpler feature with higher value based on the user needs. Figure it out accordingly.

Some of the prominent prioritization methods; you should know:

There are a lot of prioritization frameworks that help you in deciding what to build next and how effectively you can build it. Here, I would like to give you a glimpse of the most prominent ones. You can learn about them in detail by exploring Google.

RICE Scoring model

The RICE scoring model is a prioritization framework designed by Intercom messaging software to help product managers determine features, and other initiatives to put on their roadmaps by scoring these items according to four factors: reach, impact, confidence, and effort.

Kano model

Kano proposes a standardized questionnaire to measure participants' opinions in an implicit way. The participants, therefore, need to answer the questions for each product feature. Using Kano model product managers can identify the potential features and prioritize based on the product or feature that provides customers.

How to communicate clearly about the context of a feature request with the team?

As a Product Manager, you’re responsible for explaining the context clearly to the team. I know it’s pretty intimidating to run around a lot of meetings with the team but it’s crucial. The tech team should know what they are building and why is it necessary? Every feature and fixes should be explained to all the team members.

Don’t forget to ensure whether the team is knowledgeable of the feature objective, KPI (metrics of the feature build), constraints, requirements, and other criteria of success. Have a keen conversation about all these mentioned. This is the only way that makes the feature build successful.

What is Product Road-mapping?

Let us have a quick and simple look at it. The product roadmap serves as an elevated level of visual summary that maps out the steps of your plan to achieve the product goals. This type typically used to communicate about what, why, and where the product stands today. The product road map is shared with the stakeholders to converse about the steps, decisions taken for the build, and plan for how to execute the strategy includes business goals, product areas, priorities, etc.

The goal of a product roadmap is to

Explain the strategy followed for the build
Guide document for executing the strategy
Scenario and roadblock planning
Clear-cut communication with the stakeholders and customers.

When and how to plan the launch?

To reduce the risk, always try to release features in phases.

I am fairly sure, now, you will have an idea of how to prioritize the feature release. After this, the next stage would be planning for the launch. This phase is another challenging task for you to launch the feature at the correct time.

We can’t say all the releases will give the result as you expected. Fortunately, some features release will give the best results naturally but this happens only for the specific feature, which is in demand. Other times, you need to analyze the user's needs and launch the correct feature. This means it is crucial to undergo research on the product discovery for every quarterly and based on it you should plan for the next build.

When you build functionality with many features before they tested on users, it will put you in a burden on risk without knowing what would result in the launch. This state is going to be a very scariest state to pass through! So, never risk releasing many features at a time. Instead, try launching the simple features that can be easy to fix if something goes wrong. This method is known as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) strategy.

Release notes

Release notes basically serve as a communication line with the customers and power users. You can use this as an engagement channel where the customers are excited about what’s coming next.

Release notes are a great way to set the right expectations and let users know that their feedback is brewing up with meaningful changes. You can gain a chance to retain your frustrated customers who left your product because of the dark bug fixes and are not very happy on their trial.

Pro tip: Read about the release notes models to figure out which style is best for you

Conclusion

It’s quite hard to make decisions on what to build and How to build, sometimes it can be coerced. But what else is going to be the reward of your dedication, when your product brings the solution for the user's needs and evolves successfully. Ultimately, it brings revenue and development for your company!

I hope these tips will help you to kick start your next product release, build what your users love!

Hellonext is the best feature voting tool for your product which starts at $25/month. Get a free trial account on Hellonext now →

How we are reducing churn by allowing users to vote on features

Karthik Kamalakannan — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 07:01:20 +0000

This post was originally written for Hellonext.co ↗

We love it when our users grow with our product. Reducing churn and improving the revenue are two big growth factors for any SaaS product. In this post, let us tell you why we saw value in building feature voting tool, and what value it has added to our users.

We were basically trying to solve — “What feature should we build next for our product that would work well with users?”

Why use a feature voting software?

No matter the stage of growth you are in with your SaaS product, you need to have way of managing feedback from your customers.

If you are small business like us, you would receive feature requests, feedback, and other suggestions from your users from various channels like email, Twitter, so on and so forth.

This was very chaotic for us, and we quickly realized the value of “organized customer feedback” system.

How to manage new feature requests

Organizing feedback is simpler than what it used to be earlier, where we relied on Google forms, or some other contact form submission methods.

You need a tool that can help you bring all your users together, avoid duplicate feedback, know what are the most requested features and to keep all your users updated about the progress you are making to reduce churn.

So we went ahead and invested in building a product that would solve just this problem for us — feature upvote tool for users.

What solves it: Feature upvoting tool

When you show your users what you are up to next, they automatically tend to give you their feedback. Putting your work out there to all the users of our product made is easy for us to measure how users were responding to new features we were building.

Above all, with “feature voting”, users can vote on feedback that others have submitted earlier. Or submit a new feature that others can upvote to push it up the development cycle for us.

This saved both users time and our time, since they voted on features quickly, or submitted a new one. The feature upvote tool also set the expectations straight for the users about what they can expect next from us.

Pro tip: When choosing a user voting tool for your product, make sure it is well designed for your users to provide feedback. After all, they should find it easy to use.

Data backed feature building

Since our users voted on new features that they wanted us to build, it was easy for us to prioritize what we need to build next.

Also, we knew what would add value to the users, and how many would get a direct impact from this new feature when released.

How has feature voting helped us

Allowing our users to vote on new or existing features made us realize that users are starting to trust us more that we would do what they are expecting.

Simply put, users tend to wait it out for the next feature to come, before they completely make a jump to another product.

Users, when they vote on features, become a part of the product building process. This has created a sense of community, where us and our users live in the same reality. They see what we see.

No product has ever failed because of their community. They have only grown exponentially.

What benefit did our users get out of feature voting

The benefits our users got were measurable and straightforward:

Customer happiness improved
Users knew what was coming next for them for the money they paid
Every upvote was a strong communication to us that we need to care about them
Users were kept in the know about the progress we were making for the feature they supported

Impact was real & visible

The formula for us became simpler after our users started voting on features:

Number of happy customers = less churn = more revenue

#EveryVoteCounts

What I learnt about obsessing with my competitors

Karthik Kamalakannan — Sat, 16 Feb 2019 15:50:51 +0000

I am obsessed with my competitors. I literally track them everywhere. Meticulously and relentlessly.

When I started Skcript back in 2013, I was obsessed over my competition that I would give a lot of damn about it. Few years went by, and it was 2016, and the feeling of never being able to ‘pause’ (not stop) my running started sinking in. I went on a drive one nice evening to see how I cloud overcome this mindset and move on to focus on other things that we could do at Skcript.

What I realized about analyzing by competition was something different.

People say that competition is good. And that you will have to be obsessed over your competition. The real reason behind that is not to keep your company updated all the time, but to know what your customers really want. Period. It is that simple.

Knowing what your customer wants is more important than watching your competition closely. It is probably the only single metric that will matter to you when you are new to the market trying to create something good.

Watching your competition and being obsessed over them comes as a part of knowing your customers well enough.

Post that long drive I had in 2016, after being stressed, the one thing that changed in me to build great products that matter, is where I looked at my competition.

Earlier, I used to obsessively follow them everywhere. On social media, get more information about them from friends, and my major stress came in when I used to hear news saying that they on-boarded say 2000 more users on-to their platform.

Today, all that I look for and the one metric that helped me grow our revenue was to analyze my competitors’ feature set and figure out why they built it like they did. Considering my competitor as one of my biggest and free user-testing providers made all the difference.

Ultimately, we all are here to solve a customers’ problems. Not our own problems.

This post first appeared on Karthik's Desk on Skcript.

Should I choose Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0 over Fabric 1.0 for my private blockchain?

Karthik Kamalakannan — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 17:58:49 +0000

The Hyperledger Blockchain project is at its peak right now. With big companies like IBM and technology based companies like us, contributing to the project, the project is seeing faster development cycles than it had before. This is something we're definitely proud of.

The recently announced Enterprise Ready Sawtooth 1.0 is big. The Sawtooth project, which was moved from Intel to the Linux Foundation, is something that aligns a bit with Hyperledger Fabric, but with a little more maturity.

The biggest area where both the project differ are in the philosophy behind the projects.

Hyperledger Sawtooth for example, focuses on creating very secure way to handle your smart contracts, with stricter rules and consensus.

Hyperledger Fabric on the other hand, can optionally enforce these rules, which helps a lot of different private blockchain providers right now.

If you are looking to build a very secure, strictly distributed private blockchain, Sawtooth would be the best choice. Here's why, Sawtooth 1.0 is a major release in the history of Hyperledger Project:

Distributed ledger; Sawtooth aims to have distributed ledgers, truly distributed.

Secure Smart Contracts; With a strict policy to have your information truly distributed, the Smart Contracts are safer and Enterprise ready.

BFT Enabled; When I saw that Sawtooth is Enterprise ready, the major reason is that it comes with Byzantine Fault Tolerance features. This BFT feature gives much higher tolerance rate than the Crash Fault Tolerance in Fabric.

Global State Agreement enforces; This module gives a assurance that each node has exact same copy of the database as the other notes in the blockchain network. Backed heavily by cryptography.

Parallel Transactions; The ability to have parallel transactions with Sawtooth makes all the difference. Thus reducing the amount of time it takes to process transactions in the system.

So, should I choose Fabric or Sawtooth?

The decision purely depends on your use-case. A well experienced Blockchain Consultant will be able to help you make this decision faster.

If you are looking at a private blockchain network that holds highly sensitive data and a sensitive smart contract, Sawtooth could be one option you should consider.

You can interact in our Blockchain Forum with more questions.

Six ways the blockchain can be an advantage for Supply Chain

Karthik Kamalakannan — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 22:14:07 +0000

The blockchain for supply chain is going to be the standard in the industry in the next five years. We've already seen the adoption of the blockchain technology with our supply chain customer, and this article focuses on the advantages that the blockchain has on the supply chain industry.

Supply chain, as a process in any major company, encourages visibility and efficiency. When done right, it can be one of the smoothest and the most efficient processes in the entire manufacturing workflow, which can save a lot of time for the manufacturers as well as the customers.

Here are the six major advantages the blockchain brings to the supply chain industry:

Reduce or eliminate fraud in the supply chain process; Since the blockchain does not allow any tampered information to enter into the system, it is a given fact that any fraudulent activity will be explicitly visible in the blockchain. This eliminates the entire concept of product counterfeiting in the supply chain flow.
Increase trust among parties; Trust is the single biggest factor that can make or break a business. The blockchain technology is all about trust. Learn more here.
Reduce paperwork unto 15%; With big players like MAERSK implementing Hyperledger based blockchain to cut down their paperwork by 15%. The blockchain helps companies by validating every single transaction with tight consensus algorithms that do not allow information tampering and ensures validity.
Improve inventory management; With the blockchain, which relies on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), the need to manage your inventory is much easier, since everyone holds a copy of the information.
Identify issues faster; With the blockchain in place for your supply chain, whenever there is a change in the information that was not intended to happen, the tight smart contracts protect these from happening. If there's something wrong with an inventory item, it would show up in the chain of custody.
Security is everything; Information that is exchanged in any supply chain process is confidential. With information like the invoices, contracts and other confidential information floating around, the blockchain helps companies protect this information with the best cryptography techniques the industry has seen today.

The blockchain is here to stay. Some people call it the new Internet. And we believe so. In the next five years, we believe that the blockchain would be at the center of many industries in managing information and trust.

Not sure how the blockchain could fit into your industry? Run a Blockchain Business Workshop today.

Run a Blockchain Business Workshop: SCHEDULE NOW

5 advantages of using Hyperledger Fabric for your Enterprise Blockchain

Karthik Kamalakannan — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 09:50:37 +0000

Blockchain has a huge potential to change the industry and we are already seeing it right now. With a revolutionary technology, comes with a huge responsibility to choose the framework on which you will build your blockchain network properly. I've already written about this earlier on how to choose and value a blockchain framework which you can read here.

Today, let me walk you through why Hyperledger Fabric could be the best choice to build your enterprise blockchain network.

Before I get into it, if you are not aware of what Hyperledger® is, here's a quick introduction:

Hyperledger is a blockchain framework maintained by Linux Foundation. It is intended to enable enterprises develop blockchain based application really fast. It is currently one of the most stable permissioned, general purpose and enterprise-ready blockchain development platform.

Here are the five major advantages of Hyperledger Fabric which you can take advantage of today:

1. Modular Architecture

Hyperledger Fabric encourages developers to create pluggable components into its architecture. For example, you can plug in condenses as and when you need and in one of the fastest ways possible.

This kind of modularity is enabled by its robust architecture that looks into the future of this brand new blockchain technology. This is super valuable when you would want to get things in into the system like a custom identity management system for the users to use the blockchain platform built on top of Hyperledger Fabric.

2. On-demand data retrieval

Hyperledger Fabric's Channels might be one of the most underrated feature till date. Channels allows for something called data partitioning. This allows for us to protect the data that we need to protect.

This especially comes in handy where the finance companies who are willing to adopt blockchain, express deep concerns on their competitors taking a peek at their data. We are talking about companies and banks where even a really good cryptography is not enough, considering the fact that hackers can break cryptography like in a decade when done consistently.

With Channels on Hyperledger Fabric, you can expose the data that is only necessary, and store the data that is sensitive in data partitions.

3. Built for permissioned blockchains

Not every blockchain would have to be anonymous and exposed. Hyperledger Fabric allows for all the entities to have known identities. Permissioned blockchains are the ones that the finance companies need, considering the data protection and healthcare in particular.

For example, take the case of a mortgage company using blockchain. Mortgage is not something that is publicly exposed. This calls for the parties to identify themselves in the network to verify authenticity.

4. Level of trust

The way Hyperledger Fabric handles the way transaction happens completely different than others. The focus here is to reduce the layers of trust and the number of verifications a transaction would need to have. This allows for the transactions to happen faster and better without any after effects.

The architecture diagram that we drew earlier would give you an idea about this architecture better.

5. Community Support

The community that is building Hyperledger Fabric is super vibrant today. Our engineers have been contributing to Hyperledger Fabric, and we aim to be the biggest contributor to this blockchain platform in less than 24 months.

With mainstream companies like IBM, Toyota and many other corporates adopting Hyperledger Fabric in production, the community and its support just keep growing.

The next steps

Now that you know the advantages of Hyperledger Fabric, here are some of the next steps you can take:

Learn more about the blockchain technology to understand more about blockchain for your industry and how you can take advantage of it.
Organize a Blockchain Business Workshop to get a clear insight into what blockchain can do for your business.
Join the Hyperledger Fabric Telegram group to meet people interested in Hyperledger Fabric.

What data should I store on blockchain?

Karthik Kamalakannan — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 19:55:55 +0000

The blockchain is a very tempting technology. The advantages one can see using blockchain in their business is bigger, making it one of the most talked about technologies of our decade.

Today, with companies you can work with to build blockchain for your business, it is easier to get from prototype to production in no-time at all. But ultimately, it is crucial to clearly understand the blockchain technology and its business use-case specifically for you.

So far, we've completed three major implementations of blockchain based products for two different industries across the world. What we have noticed is that the crucial decision comes in, when we are trying to arrive at the data that has to get into the blockchain network.

Before I jump into helping you understand what data should you put into a blockchain network, let me first clear the biggest myth about blockchain:

The blockchain is not a replacement for a distributed database.

What should I store in blockchain?

Blockchain is not exactly a database, in which you can store everything. One of the most important things you should remember about storing data in the blockchain is that there is no 'D' in 'CRUD' operations. Which means, what goes into your blockchain, stays in the blockchain. There is no way for you to tamper it or delete it once it is written.

Blockchain is more like time. Once something is written, you cannot go back and alter it. No matter how sensitive the data is to your business.

This makes it one of the most important business decisions to be made before the development of your blockchain network. Keeping your blockchain network as minimal as possible is very important.

Imagine a scenario where the business decides to put everything in the blockchain thinking that they could pull any data that they want at a later stage. This could include business sensitive data that the business might not want to expose to the others in the chain. With blockchain's ability to store data and make it transparent, regretting at a later point in time to remove the business sensitive data is just not possible.

This decision of what data goes in and what stays out of blockchain varies from one use-case to the other even for a single business.

Think about what is the smallest amount of information you can put into your blockchain that will get the job done for your business.

To make sure you take the right decision, run Blockchain Business Workshops in your company, where we can help you derive a realistic blockchain implementation roadmap to enable the power of blockchain for your business.

6 Blockchain frameworks to build Enterprise Blockchain & how to choose them?

Karthik Kamalakannan — Sun, 21 Jan 2018 19:39:28 +0000

Let me help you list some of the open frameworks for blockchain (both public and private blockchain frameworks), that can help you develop your Enterprise Blockchain solution faster and better. Learn more.

We’ve written quite a bit about how blockchain is impacting industries and why you should literally take a call on blockchain right now. Besides this, our Chief Architect has also written quite a bit on Hyperledger framework, which is a private blockchain framework from Linux Foundation.

WHY CAN WE (SKCRIPT) TALK ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN FRAMEWORKS?

TLDR; We’ve worked on four of these six frameworks in production. So, experience speaks.

As of today, we’ve done two large implementations of private blockchains for enterprise companies across the world. The most important decision that we would have to make every time we start off a blockchain project is to decide on the framework that we can use to get things out faster or to build something on our own.

HOW TO CHOOSE A ENTERPRISE BLOCKCHAIN FRAMEWORK?

Not everything that is open and available is for you. Choosing a framework is very tricky when it comes to enterprise grade applications, considering the impact it could have on large businesses.

Blockchain is a fairly new technology. So are the frameworks and community around them. Choosing a Enterprise Blockchain framework is even more tricky, since you will have to be careful about a variety of factors before, during and after implementation.

From our experience these are some of the factors that you should look out for when choosing your Enterprise Blockchain framework:

License ; what is the framework licensed under? Is it completely free to use? or does it comes with a package attached to it?
Community ; is the community large enough around the framework? How vibrant is the community?
Support model ; is the framework receiving any support from a large corporation? this will help predict the longevity of a framework.
Activity ; how often is the framework receiving patches and feature updates?
Roadmap ; is the framework having a roadmap that you can predict in the future?
Ease of use ; the last thing you want to do is to get stuck in a complex mesh of new technology that is yet to see large-scale adoption.

THE BIG SIX FOR ENTERPRISE BLOCKCHAIN

Today, let us help you list down the six major frameworks that you can use for your Enterprise Blockchain implementation. These frameworks are valued based on the factors we listed above. Here goes:

Hyperledger; Supported by Linux Foundation and IBM.
Ethereum; a private blockchain framework from Ethereum.
Multichain; a open platform for building blockchains.
Eris Industries; a low cost blockchain implementation framework.
R3 Corda; Corda is a blockchain framework designed specifically for BFSI industry.
Openblockchain; a open blockchain fabric code framework.

WHAT DO I DO NEXT?

The natural next step would be to try out these frameworks for your implementation or use-case. But, if you are an open to letting an expert help you with this, write here. We run Blockchain Business Workshop; a two-day event that will help you make a realistic decision on implementing blockchain for your enterprise.