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Ask IH: How do you receive feature requests and then decide which are most important? 🤔

You've got a product out into the world and have customers, but how do you formalise incoming feature requests and decide what to tackle first? 🏋️

  1. 3

    Funnily enough, I just wrote an article about how we do this today:
    https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-we-prioritize-features-at-our-early-stage-company-c89bbc8f16

    The main thing that helps us decide what to build is to pick a goal. We're currently focused on retention. So when customers paying customers request things that align w/ our vision, we'll bump them to the top of the list to build them. If we were focused on referral, activation, or acquisition our focus would be different.

    BTW I run Savio, which was built to do the job of tracking customer requests to help you prioritize what to build next 😄

    1. 1

      Great advice in my opinion.

      The goal / purpose part is missed by so many people.

  2. 3

    You can use some feedback management tool. Feedbear.com is a great product made by a friend of mine. He has been working on the project for over a year and half and he is doing a great job by listening to his customers and building new features based on the feedback he has received. So basically, he is using his own product in order to tune up that product. And it's not surprise it's working.

  3. 3

    The constant feedback loop, surveys and experiments. Accordingly, the most important one to get to know your user, the idea is to give the best service, right? So, get know, understand and satisfy.

    But for sure, fundamentally, there should be a great infrastructure for analytics + data collection/enrichment. This part needs to set up properly and should be trustworthy.

    1. 1

      @nurkhz I totally disagree.

      Surveys, analytics etc. only help you from a certain size.

      When you are small all you have to do is TALK to (potential) users.
      You need to understand their problems and who they are which you can not through a survey or some stats on a dashboard. It only gives you a false sense of understanding.

      @joshuaberetta "how do you formalise incoming feature requests and decide what to tackle first" - don't implement features you users ask for! Why? Because you don't want to build features that users want but build features that solve the users problem.

      You need to understand what the underlying problem is the user wants a solution for.
      So if you get a feature request ask yourself "Why do they want it?" or even better ASK THE USER.

      1. 1

        Good points, depends on the size of the user base, for sure. but my comment/feedback was the general approach.
        Surveys, feedback-loops and analysis part of the talking part as well on the other hand, but the scale is important as you mentioned.

    2. 1

      Good points there 👌 one must also be careful how the questions in the survey are phrased so that you don't bais the responses to your own ideas. What's your typical response rate on a customer feedback survey?

      Are there any good products for this?

      1. 2

        Feedback: Delighted == Therefore you can measure your NPS.
        (https://delighted.com/)

        Surveys - Website Immediate Feedbacks: Mostly Hotjar because you can compare it with also heatmaps and recordings.

        I would not be comfortable to share stats since I am working for a marketplace currently and I do think positioning of the brands and product is totally different. :)
        Happy to help if you need regards this.

        1. 1

          Awesome 🙌🙌

          Haha fair enough 😊 I might take you up on that offer sometime soon!

  4. 2

    I have a framework I use to make decisions like this all the time. Happy to share it with ya.

    1. Look for patterns. The more customers that ask for it, the higher on the list it goes automatically. Especially ones they'll pay more for or stay on longer for.

    2. Take the top 20% of those features that have more than one request and use them in the framework below...

    3. On a spreadsheet or whiteboard, create 4 columns: Feature, Impact, Difficulty, Difference. Write each task down in the Feature column.

    4. For each task, on a scale of 1-10, quickly give it a rating for Impact and Difficulty. Impact = how much will this move the needle (your north star metric)? Difficulty = how hard will it be to implement it (correctly). This is purely a hunch. If you have multiple founders, do this with them. If you have one coder and one no-coder, make the coder rate the difficulty and the no-coder rate the impact. This is purely a hunch and each task shouldn't take more than 1m to rate each column max. If it's taking longer than that to think about, you're taking too long and getting into the weeds. Get out. You're not implementing yet, you're making a decision.

    5. Difference = Impact - Difficulty. Maths. :) Simple as that.

    6. Sort the table by Difference. This will naturally bubble up the things that are easiest to implement with the biggest impact on the business. Do those first.

    NOTE 1: Tie breakers usually go to dependencies, but if you don't have a dependency, pick which one you think would be more fun to go first.

    NOTE 2: There are cases where you have something that is a dependency that has to come before another task. If that's the case, just move it around as needed to make sure you do the dependency first.

    That's it. Hopefully it's helpful. Enjoy.

  5. 2

    The book "Getting Real" talks about this. They (37signals/basecamp) don't, they think if its important enough customers will remind them.

    https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/05.7-forget-feature-requests
    https://basecamp.com/books/getting-real

    1. 1

      Thanks for this 🙌 always love the Basecamp material. I'm interested to hear if this approach works well for other companies and products too... seems like it could potentially backfire

  6. 1

    It's a good start @joshuaberetta

    Avoid asking for features, because that's your job as a founder. Instead, talk to your customers and see how you can solve their problems (then you convert into features for a broader audience)

    Regarding prioritize, what I usually do (even it's just a silly small project), I still talk to people how they want to make problems disappear. You might want to start with the idea where you can complete real quick and able to deliver quick wins.

  7. 1

    I prefer to do it the way 37 signals described in their "Getting Real" book: Listen to the customer/user, listen again, make some notes about what they want or their pains and prioritizing everything based on the frequency of requests.

    But also I take into consideration the time feature/issue will take to build/fix and how it will affect my product in terms of growth, money.

  8. 1

    If you've got incoming feature requests, you'll want to think about what metrics you want to change. If you are looking for growth, what features will bring in people to your product. What features did people who don't sign up to your app want. Harder to get, but very useful.

    For reducing churn, what are features that people requested before they left or before their activity started dwindling down. That can also overlap with growth customers.

    To increase your word of mouth or upsell potential. Build features that your active users want.

    I usually try and prioritize everything from the standpoint of revenue. What will make me the most if implemented well? Then you may shuffle that around a bit by ease of implementation as well.

  9. 1

    I ask very generic, open-ended questions to my beta testers and store their feedback/requests in a Notion board like this. To prioritize I just keep a simple count of the number of times someone has asked for that feature, and weigh that against my own opinions on what the app is missing.

  10. 1

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