How do you know what to build?

September 30th, 2008 · 10 Comments · Marketing and Branding

Seth Godin recently had a great post about which customers you should listen to in terms of your product. Here’s his take on listening to your customers:

“Here are three common listening mistakes:

- Believing that your customers are monolithic, that they all want the same thing.

- Believing that loud customers speak for all customers.

- Worrying that if you don’t satisfy short-term, loudly articulated needs, you will fail.

There’s an art here, it’s not a science. I’d focus on a few tactics:

- When someone is in pain, recognize it and address it if you can.

- You decide, not your customers, where you want to go. Lead, don’t follow.
Amplify the voices of the people you care about, those with the most value to you in the long run.

- Give them a platform and make it easier for them to speak to you and the rest of the market.”

So, when you are the product owner or product manager on your organization’s development projects, how do you prioritize what gets built and when. Who do you listen to most? I think using some of the tactics mentioned above can really help you. Here are the things I would focus on in prioritizing your backlog and development efforts.

1. First and foremost, give your customers a forum to speak. It could come from several places: website feedback, a community blog, customer service, tech support, sales, etc. Centralize this feedback so that you have a unified view of your customer voice.

2. Use a ranking scheme to prioritize your backlog. Consider the following factors and rank each backlog item on a scale of 1 to 5. The cumulative score of these four factors is your raw prioritization:

- User value: How many customers asked for a specific feature?
- Competition Value: How much does this feature put us ahead of our competition?
- Strategic Value: How does this feature advance our product strategy?
- Revenue Value: How much revenue is blocked because we don’t have this feature?

You can refine this raw score by weighting the scoring factors based on the objective of your next release. For example, if your next release is strategic in nature, weight the Strategic Value score higher than the other three scores. Although this may not be the perfect system for getting your product backlog organized, it forces you to think through not only customer demands (which are always important), but other factors that can allow you to lead in your market space.

1 Dan Waldron // Sep 30, 2008 at 9:16 am

A friend of mine just emailed me one of your articles from a while back. I read that one a few more. Really enjoy your blog. Thanks
2 cspag (Chris Spagnuolo ?) // Sep 30, 2008 at 9:28 am

How do you know what features to build in your next release: http://tinyurl.com/4jzzcz
3 Chris // Sep 30, 2008 at 11:07 am

Glad you’re enjoying the blog Dan. Thanks for reading.
4 Howard Fine // Sep 30, 2008 at 4:52 pm

I agree in how important it is to prioritize in so many areas. I just found a new product that I immediately signed up to beta test when another Director sent me this link… what a powerful, yet simple way to confidently prioritize. It is based on Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis and they even have a neat example showing how a team can prioritize which features to include in a ‘feature lock freeze’.

http://go.catalyst.com/?linkid=8034156

Cheers,

Howard Fine
Director of IT
5 Chris Spagnuolo's EdgeHopper // Oct 1, 2008 at 2:17 pm

[...] How do you know what to build? [...]
6 Arjan`s World » LINKBLOG for October 1, 2008 // Oct 1, 2008 at 2:45 pm

[...] How do you know what to build? - Chris Spagnuolo ‘ Seth Godin recently had a great post about which customers you should listen to in terms of your product. Here’s his take on listening to your customers ‘ [...]
7 Chris Spagnuolo's EdgeHopper // Oct 9, 2008 at 3:02 pm

[...] When considering what our customers really want from us, it’s important to not just give them exactly what they ask for. Sometimes, it takes some imagination to give them what they really want. [...]
8 Chris Spagnuolo's EdgeHopper // Oct 13, 2008 at 10:37 am

[...] 2. What’s Relevant Now: From the items posted on your wall, select a goal to focus on in either your next iteration or release. This should be a goal that furthers one of your primary business objectives. If you don’t know what these are or how to arrive at them, check out this post on How to Decide What to Build. [...]
9 Chris Spagnuolo's EdgeHopper // Oct 23, 2008 at 9:41 am

[...] is on my Mac. Way more than what I need is on my Vista machine. It always seems to me that Apple listens and builds what its’ users want and need. And they build it well. Microsoft on the hand seems like it wants to tell its users what they [...]
10 Chris Spagnuolo's EdgeHopper // Nov 3, 2008 at 5:01 am

[...] And, because your team and product owner spent a little time living with their user stories, prioritizing and sizing the stories in the uncluttered backlog should be easier [...]