Feature Prioritization

151 tools to strategically prioritize initiatives with tons of linked resources for your inspiration.

In this post, Jordan Lamborn provides 155 feature prioritization ideas for product managers. The frameworks include the agreement and certainty matrix, impact vs effort, values vs feasibility, among many others and all contain tons of linked resources.

Eight alternatives ways to represent and manage your product backlog to make it more impactful.

The Product Backlog tends to grow, seemingly exponentially, as the product matures and more users enter the system. With more and more cases to handle, it becomes essential to groom the backlog in different ways depending on context. Anthony Murphy shares 8 different ways you can organize your backlog to get the visualization that you need for every situation. Each organization illuminates clarity onto the backlog from a different perspective.

Defining the goals of a product to understand what value means and how to decide what to deliver and when.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Stephanie Ockerman looks at many aspects that define a product and its goals. She addresses some of the questions around what value means and how value is critical to deciding on what to deliver for the product and when.

Creating an MVP through iterative delivery and constant customer feedback.

Willem-Jan Ageling writes about Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and the importance of Scrum when deploying an MVP, suggesting that Scrum is all about empiricism and helping stakeholders make potential future customers part of the product's journey. He also acknowledges that MVPs help reduce the risks of burning out cash on a product that might not coalesce with the customers as they enable early users to interact and provide feedback for the product's development. Check the article to gain more insight into what is an MVP, its impact on future potential customer development, and the role of Scrum in MVPs.

Defining how value is context dependent and the definition of value in a certain context may change over time.

Robbin Schuurman explores the question of 'What is value in a product?" noting that product owners should maximize the value of the Product, in order to create, deliver and maintain a successful Product. However, he also captures that 'value' is dynamic and context-dependent thus its definition might change over time. He further suggests 10 tips to product owners about business values.

Concepts around handling complexity in Agile at scale.

In a very quick overview of what is a team backlog and how to effectively manage it, the SAFe team explains the basic concepts of handling team tasks. Besides defining what the team backlog is and how to handle it, this article explains how to optimize value delivery and system health with capacity allocation, and how to handle backlog refinement.

Maintaining a suitably detailed, one year rolling roadmap - progressively disclosing options/solutions.

Roadmaps define a project's goals and major deliverables (milestones) in a given timeline. They show what the project is to deliver now, next, in the near future, and later on. However, how would you best know the most viable feature to roll out to the customers through the project's timeline? John Cutler believes that teams leveraging 'suitably detailed roadmap items', are more likely to deliver the most viable solution to the customers. Such Roadmaps contain multiple options regarding one issue that the team tries as a solution to prioritize one as the main option.

Understand customer priorities.

Effective product teams not only understand which set of features must be present to justify a release, they have carefully enumerated the ranking of each. They also know that different market segments may not agree among these rankings, so they seek to understand differences among the market segments. The 20/20 Vision game can help you collaboratively achieve the best ranking together with your stakeholders. Asking your customers to prioritize a list of features without providing them the opportunity to explore design continuums or dependencies often results in misunderstandings. By facilitating discussions of feature priorities with several customers, you will give them the chance to explore design continuums and relationships that result in a better understanding of market needs.

Activity Overview: Start by writing one feature each on large index cards. Shuffle the pile and put them face down. Take the first one form the top and put it on the wall. Take the next one and ask your customers if it is more or less important than the one on the wall. Place it above or below, depending on its relative importance. Repeat this with all of your feature cards. Your goal is to encourage the debate, but to do so you’ll need to answer their questions about features. Customers often change priorities by adjusting choices on design continuums.

Prioritize features.

Which feature will entice customers to purchase your product? Which feature will cause customers to upgrade? Which feature will make customers so happy that they’ll ignore or tolerate the features that they wish you would fix or remove?

Product planners endlessly debate these and other kinds of questions. Choosing the right set of features to add to a release often marks the difference between short-term failure or long-term success. Unfortunately, too many product planners make this choice without involving the people most affected by it—their customers. The Buy a Feature game improves the quality of this decision by asking your customers to help you make it.

Activity Overview: Create a list of features with an estimated cost. The cost can be development effort or actual cost you intend to charge for the feature. Customers "buy" the features that they find desirable, and participants may also pool resources to buy features too expensive to be purchased with individual funds. This helps motivate customers to negotiate between themselves as to which features are most important. Observation of this negotiation provides great insight into what customers are willing to pay for.

Use outrageous features to discover hidden breakthroughs.

An outrageous feature induces cognitive dissonance. That’s fancy language for saying that an outrageous feature makes customers uncomfortable. So, they work (mentally) to get rid of the discomfort. The most common ways to deal with the discomfort are rejecting the feature outright, pretending that the feature was never really discussed, or trans-forming the “outrageous” feature into something that isn’t so outrageous. The magic happens during these transformations—they are the things that can create breakthroughs in the product. The Give Them a Hot Tub game encourages you to generate your crazy ideas and let your customers determine just how crazy those ideas really are!

This game is useful if you need to build products that operate in various “extreme” environments, because you typically can’t easily simulate or access the extreme environment. Examples of extreme environments include those that are physically demanding or dangerous or those where the risk of human, societal, or financial damage is high should a failure occur. In these situations, the Give Them a Hot Tub game enables you to safely explore potential solutions for extreme environments.

Game Overview: Several potential product features appear on a shuffled set of note cards, one feature per card. Some of the proposed features are completely outrageous, such as a "crush rocks" setting for a new food blender. Observers note what happens when a customer uncovers one of these outrageous features. The biggest preparation challenge when playing this game is creating features that are extreme enough to cause cognitive dissonance, yet not so extreme as to force customers to reject the game. The facilitator presents each feature to customers and invites them to respond in one of three ways: 1) Accept the feature as is with no changes; 2) Reject the feature outright as something they don't want; 3) Transform the feature into a new feature that is something that they do want. Then ask for explanations for transformations, capturing both the initial outrageous feature and how this feature was ultimately transformed.

Pandora CTO Tom Conrad explains how Pandora picks the most important features to build with its limited engineering power.

How to use BRICE scoring to solve relevant product problems.