How can a product manager decide which product features to prioritize?
Product Management
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When it comes to product development, there is no shortage of ideas and potential features to include in your product. But with limited time and resources, you'll need to prioritize which features to focus on in order to maximize your efforts. Here are some ways to help you decide the product features to hone in on.?
1. Return to your product strategy: Your product strategy should outline your product’s core objective and lay out goals throughout the product development process and after launch. Focus on the features that align with those objectives and remember that your product vision shouldn’t just revolve around what's cool or trendy but rather what will make your product more effective at solving your target audience's problems or meeting their needs.
“You can't prioritize effectively without a clear product strategy. The strategy gives you the points of focus you need to figure out what's most valuable to work on next. When you start with strategy, prioritization questions become a lot clearer and it becomes easier to communicate the 'why' behind prioritization decisions, too.”
— Dave Masom is the chief product officer at environmental monitoring subscription company Conserv. He has over 10 years of experience in product management and consulting.?
2. Utilize customer feedback: Pay attention to what customers are saying about your product, as well as what features they want to see added or improved. This feedback can help you understand what is most important to your customers and prioritize accordingly.?
3. Assess impacts and dependencies: Ask yourself how difficult it will be to implement certain features, and whether some features rely on other features being completed first. By keeping these dependencies in mind, you can make informed decisions about what to tackle first.
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4. Be flexible: Remember that product development is an iterative process, which means that you'll often need to make changes and adjustments as you go. Stay flexible and be open to revisiting your product’s design as new information comes in or as customer feedback shifts.??
5. Collaborate with your team: Your team can offer invaluable feedback about what features are feasible, what might be risky and what could yield the best results for your product. Engage in regular discussions and brainstorming sessions to make sure everyone is on the same page.
“Prioritization, like other problems, is not just a product manager's job to solve. Product managers have to involve users, stakeholders, engineers, designers and many other people to have the data and understanding to make a sound judgment call on what is good for the user and the business.”
— Ashley Roberts is a senior product manager at software development company Everee. He holds over 8 years of experience in product management.?
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This article was edited by LinkedIn News Editor Felicia Hou and was curated leveraging the help of AI technology.
Technical Sales Specialist @ Sartorius | Bio Analytical Sales I help scientists in the life science disciplines to do smarter, simpler kinetics and quantitation, allowing them to produce actionable insights faster.
2 年Being in touch with trending developments in target markets and embracing key accounts that are pushing these trends will help to establish a road map of product features that would be useful, time saving, improve metrics that customers care about and as always look for the disruptive features that differentiate the product out from the competition and change the prevailing market perception and that can be translated into sales benefits that your salesforce can espouse and explain cost : value benefits to potential customers. Needs to be balanced with R&D costs, time to market and sufficient beta testing to establish reliability and desirability. Need a cluster of diverse users who might benefit from the feature to participate in beta testing and supply feedback , for some price reduction incentive, if they participate and then buy it.
Partner & Mfg’s Sales Representative
2 年I think that the decision lies in a weighted survey that you do with your key target customers.
2x Boy Dad | 10+ years Product | Insights Driven
2 年Ultimately, you should be focusing on finding evidence that a customer will value and use your product and has the willingness to pay for it. You can start off as lean as a customer survey or a myriad of other small/cheap experiments. As your ideas develop and your designs get a higher level of fidelity, you have the burden of getting higher standards of evidence.
Customer Success I Business Analysis I People Management I Operations
2 年Knowing your product and doing product research on your competitors is essential. Also, following up with existing users of your product will typically dictate which features demand the most improvement, thereby creating a roadmap for prioritization.
I use AI to help organizations conquer culture, people, product, process, and tech challenges. Fractional CHRO, HR Innovation Consultant, HRTech Product Manager, Remote work expert. productizehr.substack.com
2 年I like both of the previous suggestions. And having a scorecard definitely improves the consistency of the whole process. At the end of the day, there is no shortage of proposed frameworks for prioritizing, from MuSCoW, through Kano, to RICE and many others (https://www.productplan.com/learn/product-management-frameworks/). I think what matters in choosing one of these frameworks is -how comfortable the PM feels with the framework and how it fits within the organization and the industry -how well the PM can communicate and "sell" the criteria to garner support from other stakeholders -how consistently the process is used, to gain trust, Since all frameworks are lenses through which you see reality, sometimes, whenever there is a chance, it might even be a good idea to look at it through a couple of those lenses and see if the results are significantly different depending on the framework you use. This can inform not just the decision at hand, but also any preexisting bias you're bringing into the decision.