Prioritizing product features well affects your business, whether your customers are happy or unhappy. Your team’s focus will improve, the usage of resources will be more efficient, and the results for your company will be better thanks to excellent product feature prioritization.
The top product teams prefer product research over intuition or presumptions when choosing which features to build. However, as any product researcher can relate, it is challenging to translate extensive product research into prioritized, clear-cut product features.
In this blog, we will disclose product feature prioritization and how to create a strategy for customers to be more interested in your product or services.
What is product feature prioritization?
Product feature prioritization ranks and organizes product features based on consumer value, business objectives, time, cost, and technical feasibility.
Related organizations are the key to creating a roadmap for stakeholders. This helps product managers concentrate on the most critical features and make smarter roadmap choices.
Product managers may quickly get overwhelmed without a feature prioritization structure, leading to wrong judgments. A system may assist product managers in comparing feature values and deciding which to focus on first. It helps handle client feedback and coordinate their workforce.
The primary objective of feature prioritization is to provide consumers with value as soon and effectively as feasible while maintaining a positive customer experience. Using feature prioritization, you may analyze which improvements will be most valuable to your client base and give them the highest priority.
Strategies for product feature prioritization.
Several methods estimate the number of product features in a backlog. While some are more concerned with the feature’s urgency, others are more concerned with the benefit-to-effort ratio. To make the best decision at any given time, product managers need to be knowledgeable about a specific prioritizing framework and know all these techniques by heart.
The most important ones are listed below:
MoSCoW method
The acronyms M (Must have), S (Should have), C (Could have), and W (Won’t have) are the sources of the names of this feature prioritization approach. Stakeholders, among others, utilize it often to comprehend the importance of projects in a certain release.
Four separate categories make up this priority framework:
- Must-haves: Features that you can’t live without.
- Should-haves: important features.
- Could-haves: things that would be nice to have.
- Will-not-haves: Features that aren’t as important.
The key purpose is to give each feature a label that accurately describes its goals.
Before using this prioritization framework, the stakeholders and the product managers need to ensure that the general goals, the product strategy, and the prioritization factors all fit together. Then, if there are any disagreements, they can discuss how the product team will settle them. Finally, they can make some product decisions by deciding how many resources to give to each category.
RICE technique
The RICE acronym stands for each focus area you may achieve by using this prioritizing structure to its full potential. Regarding a proposed feature, you should additionally take into account:
- Reach: how many clients a feature will be able to reach.
- Impact: the impact score ranges from 0 (lowest) to 3 (highest).
- Certainty: the degree of assurance you have in light of study or statistical data.
- Effort: based on a person-monthly relationship, effort.
Once you have all the data, you can use the equation to get the final score and do that feature prioritization magic:
Rice Score = (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort
Product managers may obtain a summary of their forecasts using the RICE score. The quantitative approach in this prioritizing framework may not always be the best. However, it could be useful when trying to make more nuanced, complex judgments.
Matrix of impact vs. effort
This method visually shows the product’s features from a technical point of view. In this case, it’s essential to give points to each element based on how it works and how much it takes to make it work.
With the impact, you’ll come up with your feature placed in a cartesian matrix. You can now look at your product roadmap quickly.
This method helps us put features in a more precise order of importance and shows and suggests a straightforward way to find the right solution for others.
Product feature prioritization scorecard
By creating their own categories, each product manager and their team may measure the importance of each feature using this technique.
With your team’s assistance, define each category and give it a symbolic weight. Each meeting attendee may now get 100 points by type. They may begin allocating their points and ranking the features after having a conversation to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Pro tip: Separate categories should be made for the technical and product teams after they assess the identical feature list and are categorized using the scorecard. Your feature prioritizing procedure will provide simple features that might affect clients.
Rating of Opportunities
Due to its reliance on user input, opportunity scoring is an excellent way to identify new possibilities while lowering risks. This feature prioritization approach is also known as opportunity analysis or gap analysis. It highlights aspects that users deem vital and underdeveloped.
Teams should enhance features that are rated as essential yet unsatisfactory. Instead, suppose a part earns a low score for both satisfaction and relevance. In that case, it may be ignored, and the focus can be diverted to another area.
Finally, let’s suppose consumers find a feature offering valuable and satisfying. In that case, management may focus on new approaches to raising ROI by accelerating the innovation around this feature.
Conclusion
Product feature prioritization is a way to develop products in a planned manner. Talking about things to construct or enhance always creates incredible enthusiasm. We like to try out new features. Imagine all the great locations your product may travel to, the effects they could have, and the best-case scenario. You must, however, speak truth to power as a product manager.
Remember that your overarching strategy and product roadmap must always come first when you go through and rank the items on your product roadmap. Avoid letting an intriguing concept cause you to lose sight of the broader picture. Always prioritize long-term planning above immediate outcomes.
The QuestionPro staff can assist you with the process and ensure you get the most out of your data. Connect with our team of professionals if you need any assistance doing research or developing a data repository.
