Apple Vision Pro

Posted on by Rich Sharples

If you know anything about me, you know the two things that test my resistance are bike shops and the Apple stores. So, over the weekend, I found myself in the local Apple store and chatted with the guy serving me. The discussion led to the Vision Pro. With a bit of time on my hands, I agreed to a quick 15-minute demo.

I wear progressive lenses with a pretty complex prescription, so the first potential hurdle was getting the optical inserts set up and whether they would even support my prescription. Apple has an in-store machine that will measure your existing eyewear, so you don’t need to have your prescription details. That worked incredibly quickly, and the store will even mail you the settings for later use.

The headset is quite a bit smaller and lighter than I expected – I have owned the last few iterations of the Meta headset, and they’re much bigger. The device feels well-engineered, and the materials feel the quality you’d expect on a $3500 device.

I only had a quick 15-minute scripted demo, so I didn’t have much time for free play, but here are the things that really jumped out at me.

Ergonomics – It may help that I’m a long-time Apple user, but the user interface felt incredibly natural – after just the briefest of explanations, I could open, close, move, resize windows, zoom, and scroll. This in itself is incredible for a couple of reasons:

  • There are no hand controllers – you just use your eyes to select things on the screen and your fingers to perform operations
  • The accuracy is pretty impressive, considering what is going on here.

With one exception – you have to use the watch-like bezel on the headset for specific operations – there has to be a good reason for this departure from the hand gesture UI – I just can’t think what it is.

Video and audio quality – the regular UI is really nice – if you’re used to having one or more big curved monitors on your desk – you will be at home. Where things get really amazing is the 3-D immersive video. The demo movies were on par with a recent trip to the Sphere in Las Vegas – parts of your brain really are tricked into thinking that you are there, inside the movie. There were a couple of demos of sports games. I think this could be an opportunity for Apple – for the real sports aficionado – the sticker price probably won’t be a significant obstacle – I just don’t know how many broadcasts take advantage of the technology today – if the EPL gets on board. I will have to take a second look! Watching regular TV and movies – I’m less certain about that – those things are relatively social activities and I can’t imagine households buying multiple headsets.

For me, the question remains—would I buy it, and more importantly, would I use it? The short answers are —no, I didn’t buy one, and no, I don’t think I would use it. I can say this with some certainty as I bought the last couple of iterations of the Meta headsets and stopped using them after about a month.

The longer answer is less certain. I’d love a more extended session with a keyboard and mouse pad and determine if it could be used for work. My current office setup is nice, and the cost easily exceeds the price of a Vision Pro. The problem with the work use cases is that Apple really caters to creative workers – designers and developers – both need decent power on their desktops. The Pro is M2 powered but specced like a mid-range laptop – if you are doing builds, video encoding, etc., that probably isn’t going to be enough given the horsepower needed to deliver the Pro UX. So you’re likely going to have your regular laptop/desktop and use the Vision as the display – that is currently supported, but I didn’t play with that feature – I think that could be pretty neat. I have a few Apple (and other) machines in my office and use virtual displays regularly.

I think AR/VR’s time will come as the technology evolves and the use cases and killer applications become more apparent. What we see with the first version of Vision Pro and Meta’s latest offering are incremental steps in a revolution in human/computer interaction. I’m looking forward to a longer demo and to see what version 2.0 looks like.

Conquering the Chaos: Feature Prioritization

Posted on by Rich Sharples

In the fast-paced world of product development, and with limited resources and time, prioritizing what your development teams should be working on is one of the most demanding challenges Product Managers face.

As product leaders, it’s essential to understand the Pareto Principle to separate and prioritize the “Vital Few” features or RFEs from the “Trivial Many.” Every product leader likes to think they have good instincts regarding which feature to build next, yet most products ship features that are rarely used or never used. As a practical aside – there’s only one thing worse than a product or feature with no users, and that’s a product or feature with a single user or small number of users. You still have to carry the cost of the feature for the long term but get little value out of it.

Deciding which features to prioritize requires a framework to remove some subjectivity and stress from the decision-making, allowing you to move swiftly and confidently.

This blog post equips you with the knowledge and tools to navigate the prioritization process effectively.

Why Prioritize?


“Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.”

– Thomas Edison.

You can’t plan without prioritization, and without a plan, your product is much more likely to fail. Good prioritization allows you to:

  • Focus on what matters most: Align features with your product vision and business goals. By identifying the “vital few” features, you can prioritize development efforts on what truly matters, leading to a more valuable and impactful product.
  • Deliver value faster: Get the most impactful features to users quickly. Identifying and focusing on the core features allows you to launch your product quicker, capturing market share and user feedback earlier.
  • Optimize resource allocation: Ensure your teams work on the right things at the right time. Limited resources can be directed towards developing the most impactful features, maximizing the return on investment.
  • Simplify the User Experience: A product with fewer, well-designed features is easier to learn and use, leading to higher user satisfaction.
  • Simplify the GTM. A product, even an MVP, with a clear purpose, value proposition, and a focus around a distinct set of use cases is much easier to position and sell.

Alignment

Ultimately, we all want to deliver the highest value features to the end user as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, while the goal sounds simple – the reality is quite a bit more complex.

For starters, what does “highest value” mean – most used? Higher willingness to pay? Most likely to deliver better productivity or enhance quality? Better stickiness? You can only answer these questions if you have a well-articulated strategy and set goals or objectives for the offering. Alignment to objectives is part of the prioritization process.

Who are your users? Are they all treated equally? Do you need to segment by free or paid or by customer/account size?

Are there dependencies between features? Do you need to deliver feature X before feature Y has real value?

Frameworks for the Win

Several frameworks can guide your prioritization journey. I split them into two broad categories depending on where you are in your product journey.

The first are lightweight frameworks that don’t require a lot of customer/prospect data and can be used to prioritize pretty much anything. Use these frameworks for early MVPs where your market sense is still the most significant determining factor.

  • Value vs. Effort: Plot features on a matrix based on their perceived value and development effort. These charts are nothing more than a simple way to visualize the choices.
  • MoSCoW Method: Categorize features as MUST-have, SHOULD-have, COULD-have, and WON’T-have based on their importance and feasibility. MosCoW is the simplest model and doesn’t require a lot of data to drive – it’s nothing more than a way to capture your market sense/instinct.

The second category assumes you have more data to drive your decisions and are more appropriate to a more mature offering in a more mature organization. The quantitative approach vs. the objective approach will allow you to scale, take toil, and stress out of the process and also let you tune your prioritization based on other factors such as market segment, customer size, or other objective categorizations (UX, security, retention).

  • R(ICE): Score features based on Reach (Impact, Confidence, and Effort) to compare features or enhancements quantitatively. (more info)
  • Kano Model: Categorize features as Basic, Performance, and Excitement to understand user expectations and satisfaction levels. (more detail)

Beyond the Framework

  • Choosing the most appropriate framework is just the beginning. Remember these additional points:
  • Gather data: Conduct user research, analyze user feedback, and leverage analytics to understand user needs and pain points.
  • Align with stakeholders: Get buy-in from key stakeholders by involving them in the prioritization process.
  • Be flexible: Market dynamics and user needs can evolve, so be prepared to adapt your priorities.
  • Communicate effectively: Clearly explain your decisions to stakeholders and users to avoid confusion and manage expectations.
  • Document Assumptions: as you learn more or situations change, you can change assumptions and reprioritize.

Whichever method you choose to prioritize feature development – effort, feasibility, or some other proxy for cost must be part of the algorithm. Creating an unachievable roadmap will guarantee some adverse outcomes:

  • Missed deadlines, overruns, and slips which will erode trust with your stakeholders (sales, execs., investors, customers)
  • Burnout amongst your team- leading to lower efficiency, leading to more overruns, and lower quality
  • Poor quality – lots of shortcuts leading to rework, half-baked, half-assed features

You likely need more information to make accurate estimates at the planning stage. Still, some cost estimates are better than nothing, and estimation is a skill that only improves with practice. Use what tools and expertise you have – expert consensus, t-shirt sizing, bottom-up, analogous estimation.

Remember, prioritization is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Regularly revisit your priorities, gather new information, and adjust as needed. By embracing a data-driven and collaborative approach, you can conquer the feature prioritization challenge and build products that truly resonate with your users.

My recommendation is that once you have decent data flowing regarding use cases and features, then it’s worth investing in PM-specific tooling (ProductBoard, Jira Align), which will give you a choice of prioritization, tunable weighting, and integration with data sources such as support systems, win-loss analysis, survey data, and user research.

It is essential to be transparent in all things related to planning and prioritization – you should be able to justify why feature X is a higher priority than feature Y. Your stakeholders and partners in engineering and marketing need to believe your roadmap is focused on the right things at the right time. Be honest about how decisions were made – ie. When you have solid data or when you are using intuition. Be honest and transparent about your confidence level – this is especially important for early-stage products or companies where intuition plays a more critical role than rigorous customer/usage data.

Curve Balls

Finally, expect an executive override, customer escalation, or some other high-priority request to land at your feet, requiring you to re-plan and reprioritize. Demanding strategic customers who need feature X before signing a renewal, your CxO prioritizes a feature due to a high-integrity customer commitment.

The reality is that you have to be able to deal with these requests – as a PM – you have to be able to quickly assess the cost, strategic alignment, feasibility, vs. the opportunity cost (what roadmap items you will need to sacrifice) – you can only do that if you have a robust framework for prioritization.