How do you prioritize and plan features?
Are there any tools or processes you use to plan and prioritize features for development?
As a solo founder and developer, Jira and Agile methods has way too much overhead for me but I feel like my brain is too cluttered to prioritize and clarify properly.
GitHub projects feels close to what I want but just not quite. Is there a methodology that you've adopted that works well?
All of the methods that I use at "work" don't translate well to the indie hacker /solo founder space.
The approach we've taken recently is to clearly lay out what the product mission is and breakdown all the ideas we had into 3 buckets. Gamechangers, Showstoppers and Distractions. The idea is that by understanding your market and user enough you should be able to distinguish between those buckets. Generally speaking have too many Gamechangers or Showstopper is a sign that you might not understand what's really valuable, but that's part of the process.
We took this methodology from http://www.defmacro.org/2013/09/26/products.html for hookdeck.io and it's been serving us well.
On top of that, for each feature we color code it in notion to keep note of how well we believe we are actually delivering on it. A feature isn't black and white, it's spectrum. You might have decided to cut a corner to to deliver it faster or you might have went completely overboard and wasted time on it. It's important to make the distinction.
The simplest method might be value vs effort.
Prioritize what provides the most value to the customers fastest - takes least effort to build.
Just take your time, go over all the ideas for features and think how big is the pain this feature is solving. Were customers asking about it and would they pay more for this feature?
Then compare it to not just how much time and skills would it be to implement it but also how hard would it be to maintain it.
A little more complex would be to plan for objectives. If you're just building MVP, you want to do just core top-value features and finish it fast so you can take feedback ASAP.
Then if you want to e.g. optimize conversion, you want to improve onboarding experience features. For growth prioritize enterprise features. And so on..
App you use for this is not that important and can actually make the it harder to focus. I would use something like Notion table for this.
the main managment is push 99% of your thought to "v2 and further"
priority should be must have function to actually achive the MVP experience, one thing that a user can do
2nd priority should be polish that
After that marketing
Than look for user feedback
If you need a system than you aren't doing MVP enough
Can also use wireframe like figma as the MVP task list, if it's not presented to the user, it's not to be built (assuming it's user facing)
You got a few screen, buttons and polish and that's the thing only. (trying to oversimplify)