You're developing a new product. How do you decide between essential features and nice-to-haves?

Developing a toy and how we go about understanding what is a nice to have and what is a need to have. My toy company Wow! Stuff has a team of product engineers and scientists that develop new toys every year. The challenge is meeting the right price and the right features and ensuring the toy is a WOW! for the kids (and sometimes adults!). The shortest and to the point summary of how we get there is to throw everything in, the coolest WOW features we can. We cost it, realise (inevitably) that it's now too expensive for the mass market and so we test what we can take out without reducing the WOW! impact. Eventually we (hope to) arrive at that perfect combination of WOW! impact and affordability - or in other words tremendous value.

Enla empresa en donde estoy priorizamos las necesidades del cliente y nos metemos al detalle de lo que hacen para poder ver cuales problemas hay y buscar las mejores soluciones Un ejemplo sería que si por ejemplo ellos no ven un cuello de botella en una operación, nosotros como externos las vemos y proponemos las herramientas de como se puede mejorar ese proceso Además de que esa investigación la hacemos de la mano con el cliente, con sus colaboradores y con los nuestros al mismo tiempo, para entender al 100% de lo que va a tratar

This phase is where we need to pro-active, curious, willing to accept defeat on Hypothesis, testing, talking to many people. If Henry Ford had asked the people around at his time, they would have said, they needed a faster HORSE. People might not know what their pain point is, it is upto us Product Guys, to smell the problem, form a hypothesis and test. Open ended interviews designed to bring out the UnSaid, Unlabelled needs. e.g - Henry Ford can go around asking questions or thinking in a Closed and Open Dialogue mode. 1) Closed - Do you find the current horse carriage slow and un-convinent --> The answer would be Yes or No. 2) Open Minded- How has owning and operating a horse carriage impacted your life? How is it helping you?

Developing a Product involves a lot of things. The Product must meet the needs of the Customers. Understand whether the Product is completely useful to the customer or whether any other competitor products offer the same features. Include other features that are not in the competitor products and make sure that your Selling Price matches the competitor's price even after including additional features. Nice-to-have features make your product more premium than others and will help you in building the brand. You have to adapt to the changes to include the Nice-to-have features and be able to Scale the product to another level after launching the product.

An interesting approach I've found effective is the "Blue Ocean Strategy" combined with a "Feature Map": Create a comprehensive feature map of all major competitors in your market. Plot these features on a graph, with the x-axis representing different feature categories and the y-axis representing the level of offering (low to high). Connect the dots for each competitor, creating a "value curve" that visually represents their offering. Analyze these curves to identify: Overserved areas: Where competitors are investing heavily but customers may not value as much. Underserved areas: Where there's potential for innovation. Unexplored areas: Potential for creating new market space. Use this insights to shape your product strategy

PRB- "decide between essential features and nice-to-haves" Delivery of value depends on the product and the phase in which the product is. If Product is yet to be validated, spending time to define and refine the problem statement that the user is most frustrated is critical. --> Solving this problem(s) is the value for the customer. There is a high probability you might be in the wrong direction, if you feel you have to build everything before validation. If the product is already launched, then advanced metrics like cost-benefit analysis and ROI , business conversions can be used.

Feedback loops are important but they shouldn’t dictate the decision between essential features and nice-to-haves. While user feedback is valuable, it can sometimes reflect immediate wants rather than long-term needs. I've learned to balance this by anticipating future user requirements and aligning them with the product’s strategic vision. Instead of waiting for feedback to reveal what’s essential, I prioritize features that will drive the product’s growth and differentiation in the market. This proactive approach makes sure we’re not just responding to current demands but also leading the way in innovation.