How to Prioritize Features
The biggest priority of product managers is to deliver value and satisfaction to the customer. Some are more important than others and so when we’re inevitably limited by resources, we must decide which ones are more crucial to create.
Deciding what’s more important isn’t easy, though. Prioritization can be rather challenging, with diverse opinions coming from all angles. Prioritization frameworks can help us to effectively filter through the many feature requests to pick those that tie to our strategy and make the best use of our resources. We briefly describe some of such used by successful managers in this article.
Kano Model
With this framework, the basis of prioritization is how much features satisfy the customer. It plots customer satisfaction against implementation to give the following major categories:
Basic features – These are product must-haves. Customers consider them compulsory. Satisfaction doesn’t increase much, if at all, when we put more effort into building them.
Performance features – These are features that lead to a commensurate increase in customer satisfaction as we invest more effort or money in them. The higher the investment, the higher the delight.
Excitement features or delighters – Customers won’t mind if we don’t provide these features. But they result in a dramatic boost in customer delight when we make them available. A little investment produces a much more significant increase in satisfaction and, possibly, our customer base.
The category a feature belongs to determines where it falls in the order of priority – delighters are quite important. A customer questionnaire will help to figure this out.
Value vs. Effort
This strategy uses the value of each feature for prioritization. Value, in this case, includes potential benefits to our target market and the possible impact for our business in terms of goals and revenue boost.
This value is assessed against the difficulty of implementation. How difficult would it be to build the feature? What would it cost us and what are the risks involved?
Initiatives that have high value while requiring the least effort get the highest priority on our roadmap. Conversely, those with low value and needing the highest effort will be at the bottom of our ranking. It’s that simple.
Weighted Scoring
Compared to the Value vs. Effort framework, weighted scoring adds more objectivity to our feature assessment. It allows us to score initiatives based on some pre-agreed criteria of what’s relevant.
This approach to prioritization facilitates discussion among team members on how best to assess features. It helps us to have unbiased conversations and has a way of adding more reliability to our product strategy.
Story Mapping
When looking to determine our MVP, this strategy will greatly be helpful. Story mapping helps to provide clarity on the customer journey and priority. The user journey is shown horizontally while the order of importance is displayed vertically, from top to bottom.
We can easily determine what needs to be tackled first and the right order to follow after mapping out user stories. This framework is quite valuable when it comes to determining what form shipping would take.
Opportunity Scoring
This framework features two axes marked Satisfaction and Importance, the factors that (together) determine what’s worth doing first.
With opportunity scoring, we list out potential outcomes of features we have in the pipeline. Then we ask customers to rate on a scale how important they consider each outcome or feature and how satisfied they are with existing solutions. Next, we plot features on a chart based on the responses for easy visualization.
Features having high importance but current low satisfaction should rank higher in our assessment.
Buy a Feature
If you wish to make prioritization even more exciting, this approach will help. Buy a Feature is an innovation game. Participants – customers and/or other stakeholders – get the same amount of money to spend on features they want the most.
Before the game, we develop a list of features and attach a “price” to each based on related costs. Participants are free to select whatever number of features their money can buy. Some won’t mind spending everything on one or two based on how important they consider those features.
We then re-arrange our list of features after the game is over, according to how much was spent on each. We can also interview participants to understand why they bought certain features instead of others.
Tips for Prioritizing Effectively
To be more efficient in prioritization, here are some key points to keep in mind:
- Prioritizing features is a task for the team, not something exclusively for product managers. Making it a team activity gives us diverse perspectives and simplifies bringing everyone on the same page.
- Less complexity isn’t necessarily better. A feature being easy to implement isn’t a good enough reason for it to rank highly. How well it ties into our product strategy is more important.
- Competition shouldn’t determine what’s more important. Our decisions should not be based just on rival products but more on research, innovative ideas, and proper validation.
- Seek to understand value. We need to know what value features offer customers, based on research, to prioritize well.
- Use themes. Rather than listing out all features, we should keep things more at a high level. Initiatives are better grouped in strategic themes for better prioritization.
