Buy a Feature cover image

Buy a Feature

Prioritize features.

Profile image of Luke Hohmann
2006 • 30 min read
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Prioritization
Planning
Brainstorming

Summary

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.

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