What are the most common mistakes when prioritizing product features?

While it's important to have a clear strategy, there can be instances where intuition and experience might lead to successful decisions. Sometimes, data doesn't tell the whole story, and the vision of an experienced product leader can identify opportunities that data might miss. It's about finding the right balance between data-driven decisions and intuitive judgment.

Not having a strategy is like having a GPS without destination. You can go anywhere. You can go through any road or route. You can take the highway and drive fast. Or take the smaller roads and enjoy the landscape. And never arrive where you intended to go. Let's build a clear strategy, so that you can input your destination in the company GPS.

Prioritisation of product feature is crucial for a Product Manager. Having a different opinion from different people (internal stakeholders) for a same feature is very important. Getting end user feedback to sense the pulse and understand the pain points while accessing the need is crucial to think if any new feature is required. Again, better collaboration to make the stakeholders informed keeps the ball rolling towards effective prioritisation.

The alignment of a product strategy with the needs of the organization is crucial: Consistency: A well-aligned product strategy ensures that the organization's goals and objectives remain consistent, preventing potential conflicts or divergent paths. Resource Optimization: It helps in the efficient allocation of resources, ensuring that the organization invests in products or initiatives that best serve its mission and vision. Maximizing Impact: When a product strategy matches the organization's needs, it is more likely to make a significant impact, whether in revenue generation, market share, or other strategic outcomes. Aligning a product strategy with the organization's needs achieve the organization's goals effectively and efficiently.

Product management is not akin to an adventurous trip. When product managers lack a clear strategy and goal, they run the risk of pursuing different directions and goals (Just as driving towards multiple destinations)resulting in a fragmented product. A clear vision guides prioritization, decision-making, and value delivery, while a well-defined strategy outlines the necessary steps to achieve success. In summary, a clear vision and strategy provide a roadmap for product managers, significantly enhancing the likelihood of creating a successful product.

Neglecting some stakeholders or depending too heavily on others can lead to biased or conflicting opinions. To avoid this, product managers should include the right people, engage them effectively, and use a structured method to gather diverse and balanced feedback for informed decision-making. A structured method for involving stakeholders could include regular meetings, surveys, or workshops where each stakeholder group gets an opportunity to share their perspectives, concerns, and priorities. This ensures a systematic and inclusive approach to collecting feedback and insights.

Not involving the right stakeholders is the perfect recipe of digging the grave for the Product, yourself and for the company for which you are developing the product. Lack of clarity brings multiple problems in the system which can lead to non trust issues.

Aligning the product strategy to organizational need helps Stakeholder Alignment: It ensures that stakeholders, both internal and external, are on the same page, reducing confusion and enhancing collaboration. Metrics : clear definition of what success looks like and measured is another key factor to be remembered.

Careful! Involving stakeholders in prioritizing the whole product backlog will result in he who shouts the loudest to be served first. Stakeholders should only have a say in prioritizing within the subset of requests that directly impact them. The whole of the prioritization should be based on product strategy, not stakeholders.

I think this is the most critical mistake when prioritising product features - not involving the right stakeholders, or in other words, not talking to your users. Only by talking to your users and stakeholders, understanding their pain points and problems, you can identify what's more critical and define a strategy. All these could ultimately help you, as a product manager, prioritise the right product features.

When prioritizing product features, a common pitfall is the 'Solution Bias,' where product managers focus too much on features and not enough on the underlying problems. This often leads to creating 'Solutions in Search of a Problem.' Here's an approach rooted in cognitive psychology: Employ the 'Pain-Gain Matrix.' This tool quantifies problems based on their 'chronicity' and 'severity,' thereby categorizing them as acute, chronic, bearable, or ignorable. This is more than just labelling a problem as 'big' or 'small'; it's about understanding its long-term impact and emotional toll on the user. This prevents feature creep and ensures you're not just adding bells and whistles but genuinely enhancing user experience.

the product should be seen as a means to an end, i.e understanding what the product will do rather than what it is. Therefore , when coming up with new product ideas, thinking about what problem or pain point it is going to relieve or resolve is very important. Then do that in the most efficient , effective and even aesthetically pleasing manner.

One thing I've found helpful is to keep in mind that no matter how many solutions I find, problems will still exist. As long as the problems exist, theres always a better solution. I particularly love and often use the theory of "Jobs to be Done" to help my clients avoid concentrating excessively on features and solutions without always intimately understanding the underlying jobs or tasks that their customers are trying to accomplish. By always focusing on "Jobs to be Done," I give my products the best chance to directly addresses real user needs and wants, resulting in valuable products. The more user-centric your strategy the more you arm your self against disruption.

Project Managers focusing on new features without tackling old/known problem would not help to gain confidence from end-users and would result in lower satisfaction and higher resistance to use the application. There should be always balance and dedicated resource to fix problems.

It's not about prioritising problems or solutions. It has to be problems and solutions should follow. Prioritization of a specific solution should be based on the severity of problem, efforts needed to build the solution and product strategy.

The most useable pieces of data for prioritization are always the impact hypothesis (what metrics will be impacted and by what factor), certainty (from pure guesstimation to full certainty, when you are fixing a bug that lowers specific conversion), and the effort needed to complete the task. No framework will work for all products and cases and even the list I provided my turn out to be really difficult to estimate. But you have to start somewhere!

Over 170 scoring/ranking methods are presently offered for product feature prioritization. The popular scoring methods, mistakenly called frameworks, include MoSCoW, RICE, ICE, WSJF, Fibonacci Numbers, Story Mapping, Kano Method, and Product Tree. These scoring methods are simple to use, but their drawbacks are being abstract, subjective, debatable, time-consuming, and do not handle Ad-hoc requests well. Consequently, these scoring methods are susceptible to personality clashes, personal biases, and internal politics. Another downside is that participants quickly gravitate to repeatedly selecting the intermediate values of the scale. The solution is a Boolean-based algorithmic model for product feature prioritization.

Although a well defined framework exists, it is required to be periodically evaluated, updated with relevant criteria, metrics and rules of the strategized product roadmap. Due to various priorities, change in strategy and asks of the customer will demand change in framework params.

Using a consistent framework for feature prioritization ensures fairness, aligning every feature with strategic goals and maintaining transparency in decision-making processes.

Using frameworks like Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) ensures clear prioritization of features to stakeholders without ambiguity.

This aligns well with the idea that strategies are a series of directions towards the ultimate destination. Directions change based on traffic, events in the vicinity and weather. The same applies for strategies. Priorities need to be revisited to accomodate for new influential factors that present either opportunities or threats. Fine tuning is required to get the most out of your fuel tank (resources) when trying to get to that ultimate destination.

It's important to be agile and change priorities if needed in order to be competitive. In today's fast-paced world, technology is constantly evolving and new trends are emerging all the time. If you're not able to adapt quickly, you'll quickly fall behind. For example, AI is becoming more accessible and affordable, and many products are changing their priorities to incorporate AI features. This is a smart move, as AI has the potential to revolutionize many industries.

It is mandatory to groom your product backlog regularly. This helps in efficient utilization of resources (specially development), ensuring relevancy of your product for your customers and positive impact on business goals. A general rule of thumb is to revisit and revise your priorities every quarter.

Change is the only constant... based on different situational and market conditions priorities of features would change and it is very important to revisit and revise priority based on current circumstances... "Backlog Refinement" is used commonly in Agile to solve same problem.

Something I always say when making trade-offs and prioritizing is to "have a defensible position". When you are saying no and thus communication priorities you must be able to explain coherently why you decided to make that choice. This will be even easier if you have previously built up good contextual understanding with said stakeholders.

Communication map is key to the success of product feature delivery. As the product manager gets input from key stakeholders , he prioritizes features based on object framework instead of driven by limitations. Being the intermediary, he has the responsibility communicate it to both upstream and downstream stakeholders. This demands a proper communication map and availability of appropriate tool sets to notify the concerned.

Common mistakes in prioritizing product features include: 1. Relying on internal opinions instead of customer data. 2. Focusing on the loudest voices, not the most important customers. 3. Prioritizing short-term gains over long-term value. 4. Lacking a clear strategy and feature prioritization process. Tips for effective prioritization: 1. Understand customer needs and pain points. Understand market, competitors, trends, company's vision and mission, strengths and develop strategy for focus and prioritization. 2. Define product goals based on strategic alignment. 3. Evaluate feature impact on customers and the business. 4. Seek input from various stakeholders. 5. Regularly review and adjust priorities to stay aligned with market changes.

Thoughts on prioritizing 1) Less is more. Maximum impact is going to be created by your Top few initiatives 2) Product manager's role is not to keep the entire engg team occupied. Outcomes over output. 3) Prioritize at all layers. From strategy to themes to features to execution. Everybody in the team plays a part.

*Most Common Mistakes* *1* Stakeholder experience became more important than user/customer experience. *2* Focus more on tactis than strategy *3* Copy or get inspired from other without evaluating whether it's applicable to ur product or not. Very common in Media/News Industry *4* Gut feeling is more than what data is saying.

I think "Trying to Please Everyone" is another common mistake: Attempting to incorporate every feature requested by various stakeholders or customers can lead to feature bloat and a cluttered user experience. We must prioritize features that align with the core value proposition and address the most critical user needs.

Another common mistake in prioritization is not keeping enough buffer for "the UNKNOWNS". Most of the time we assume that the current set of priorities is marked in stone and will be set for the next qtr or year, but then all of a sudden, a) A paying customer threatens to churn if their feature is not prioritized ( and there is no space to accommodate a POC/Spike for this customer) b) A Sr leader or company wants to feature to be prioritized for a demo/event/press etc (Engg team then works overnights) c) A major bug/regression is discovered during deployment or some 3rd party software has some vulnerabilities. And more often than not, we end up shifting releases and rejigging priorities.