How do you know what to build?
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.
Related posts:
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
How do you know what features to build in your next release: http://tinyurl.com/4jzzcz
Glad you’re enjoying the blog Dan. Thanks for reading.
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
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