Idea validation - how do you prioritise features?
Just curious how feature prioritisation differs for indie hackers vs. larger businesses. Do you use any specific processes for prioritising features? What tools do you use?
Just curious how feature prioritisation differs for indie hackers vs. larger businesses. Do you use any specific processes for prioritising features? What tools do you use?
I work at a big tech company. We do lots of a/b testing and UX research. Talking to customers and prospects is key. Go in open minded and you will find many opportunities to serve unmet needs. Once you have those unmet needs, you can begin thinking solutions and prioritization.
The above assumes the luxury of time and resources. At a startup much of this will come from people making gut decisions. Startups that fail generally didn't do a good job getting a pulse of what customers actually needed and instead relied on a bunch of gut decisions.
I answer a similar question here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/83a731a2f2?commentId=-L_azbIsk_SssSm2Psw0. Hope it helps.
It does, thank you :)
Minimum Viable product. Live it. Breath it. Become one with the only priority being to get the thing to work in the first place.
But what defines MVP? Everyone has their own interpretation of "minimum" and "viable". How do you determine what that is?
Wow, this got a good thread going. On the off chance you read this, I've worked with a handful of startups designing electronics, and MVP to me means something akin to "does a wheel have to be round, or would it be easier and faster to get a hexigon to roll?". Give the idea just enough features just to work.
And no, this isn't coming from, "the lean startup". This is my experience from working in the hardware product design space. The products that have failed are ones that were bloated before they ever start. Just build something, anything, list your specs, and then take a nice red marker and start crossing them out one by one until you literally have one or two.
The prioritization then makes itself clear on iteration. But hey, that's hardware and not software, so take this all with a grain of salt.
That comes from people not understanding MVP as it was described in "Lean Startup".
You have to start with a hypothesis you want to evaluate, the MVP is anything that allows you to answer your hypothesis with minimum effort. Of course this can vary depending on your hypothesis.
I think then you might have interpreted my question differently. I'm past the MVP stage and building a roadmap. I'm looking at specific processes people use for prioritising tasks (e.g. RICE scores, etc). Trying to validate a market for tooling around it :)
ROI Scorecard is what I prefer to use.
I actually worked on a product to create roadmaps the past weeks (getnorthstar.io) it's also using value vs. effort as it's simple and useful.
There certainly is a market as you can see by tools like prodpad.com or productboard.com
This is really useful, exactly what I was trying to validate. I wanted a similar tool and was trying to validate if it existed. Seems like it's a little saturated but there might be room to carve out specific niches here. Thank you
Yeah I also decided to change direction as I noticed not only is the space a little saturated (which I researched beforehand) but the competition is just really good at what they do. Maybe because these are product from product managers for product managers and they know what they do :D
Wish you the best of luck though!
What I did, was I had a list of features I wanted to include in my product and then I went to my community and said "hey, what do you guys want to see in this app?" and then whatever they said that matched something on my list, I bumped it up in priority.
Based on their feedback, I actually moved one feature to the top of my list. There was also a feature that I thought would be super helpful that no one mentioned at all, so that's been removed from the beta launch and will be introduced in a later version.
Thanks for your response, really interesting. So what if the feature they requested took 12 months to build? Was there any weighing up of larger issues vs. Smaller issues? Did you use any software to make this decision?