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12 Comments

How do you decide which features to prioritize in your product

What advice would you give to someone who is just starting out

on March 10, 2023
  1. 2

    Based on the feedbacks. I am developing small pieces and asking other people what they think about it and their expectations.

  2. 2

    Go with bare minimum features that are enough to launch product. For example - Tweet Scheduler, it should be able to schedule tweets and user should be able to modify them whenever it is required. By modification, I mean delete, update, and change schedule date.

    Then start adding a features one by one which your competitors has and can be added quickly. Keep complex one for later.

  3. 1

    Some good advice here, but wanted to add a bit more (a Product Manager by profession, so prioritisation is a core part of my job):

    1. If you're in the early stage of launch, reject everything that doesn't answer the following:
      1.1. Will this get my customer to experience the 'core value' of the product?
      1.2. Will this unblock my customer on the way to experience said 'core value'?
    2. If you're a bit advanced, then you want to deliver a bit more than what's absolutely necessary. So consider scoring all products on: Impact (as defined by you on what's relevant to you!), Reach (as defined by how many customers it will impact - a small portion? all?) and then on the Effort (as defined by how much time and resources it will take to build this feature). Now calculate (Reach * Impact / Effort), rank and build away. This way, you'll get a healthy mix of must-haves and delights.

    Treat every piece of feedback (customer / critique / investor suggestion) this way. It's difficult to be objective, but as a rule of thumb, always try to have an answer for why you made that decision [even if you go in the direction of just assigning must-have/could-have, etc]!

    Let me know what you think!

  4. 1

    I would do a simple prototype of the idea in AdobeXD or some similar tool. Then I would let 10-30 people test it and see what features they liked the most. Then it could be smart to prioritize the tasks based on feedback value and expected time.

    Once you start working you will get biased on what features are the most valuable, so keep talking to potential users.

    Good luck!

  5. 1

    Create a spreadsheet with two columns: the feature and a dropdown listing with two choices: Must Have & Nice To Have.

    Then only focus on the "Must Have" until you get market fit and enough revenue to hire people to work on the "Nice To Have" ;)

    Happy hustling 🚀🌙

  6. 1

    For my current project I've been making sure to track and log feedback from different categories of people:

    • Internal Feedback - least helpful but may provide expert insights
    • Marketing Feedback - helpful for knowing if the value resonates in the language/images
    • User Feedback - very helpful for knowing how to improve the core product
    • Customer Feedback - very helpful for knowing how to improve the core business model

    By doing marketing and talking to users you'll begin to understand what features interest people plus which features people really use and you can build on top of.

    One tip - be very careful adding completely new features as this can exponentially increase the scope of an app/tool. Building on top of existing features or adding slight mutations of these features will help refine the core value.

    One more tip - if you do need to add new features it can be really helpful to completely isolate these as their own app, test the feature, then integrate it into your core app if people like the feature and find value in it.

    Hope this helps!

  7. 1

    sort features on following criteria need(must have, good to have etc.), development effort required and pick the top