Your team is divided on feature request priorities. How do you navigate conflicting perspectives?

I found whiteboard tools like Figma Jam or Miro are excellent tools to make sure everyone can participate, if they wish to do so. Voting on stickers is a great way to see if there is common ground and find clues how to align them towards a unified course of action. And it's important to remind the team once again about product strategy, vision and users needs to keep them on track in their discussions.

To handle conflicting perspectives on feature requests, begin by collecting input from all team members to ensure everyone feels heard and valued, which is key for team cohesion. Implement a structured process for presenting arguments for or against features, encouraging open communication and active listening. Each member’s expertise and viewpoint should be given due consideration. This can be achieved through meetings, surveys, or a shared document where everyone can contribute their insights. This approach helps balance differing opinions and facilitates a more informed decision-making process.

Once all suggestions are collected, evaluate each feature request by considering factors such as user experience (UX), return on investment (ROI), technical feasibility, and alignment with the product roadmap. This assessment should be objective, relying on data and user feedback where possible. Prioritizing features based on their impact helps in making decisions that benefit both users and the business, minimizing the influence of personal biases or departmental agendas. This approach ensures that resources are allocated to features that provide the most value and align with overall goals.

Measuring impact is only one side of a coin, because it represents business output. However, if you want to keep user-centric approach you must estimate potential reach and feature adoption, that is how many of your users will use given feature. Will they pay more for the product because of this feature? Will it be higher subscription level? Answering these questions always helps me to evaluate priorities.

Capture the requirements for each feature, assess the value each returns, estimate the effort required to deliver and understand how well they enable long-term goals. Chunk down large tasks into smaller, more manageable pieces. Identify how tasks connect and where potential roadblocks might arise. Regularly review your plan and be ready to shuffle things around. Remember, the Product Owner holds the master plan, deciding which tasks to tackle first to optimise the team's output and achieve company objectives.

Firstly, priorities should have been set before the development team started their tasks. If this was missed, we should address it in a retrospective to prevent future issues. I would understand where the feature request came from and consider using different prioritization methods beyond MoSCoW, such as the Eisenhower Matrix or RICE. Lastly, I'd evaluate how the feature aligns with the company's goals and OKRs to ensure it supports our strategic objectives.

Make sure your team estimates tasks collectively to ensure unbiased understanding of scope. However, I find it useful to have knowledge of output of each member of my engineering team and suggest adjusting the estimate if necessary, after the team assigns the task to a certain engineer. You most likely will have engineers of different level, thus senior engineer will complete task faster versus middle level one. You can easily find individual velocity of each team member in Jira. This way you can adjust estimates to represent more realistic scope while planning sprint capacity.