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.

Product Roadmaps

Posted on by Rich Sharples

We don’t need stinkin’ roadmaps! Yes, you do, except in some rare circumstances, which I’ll outline below. 

For clarity – let’s define the term:

A product roadmap is a visual summary that maps out your offering’s features and capabilities over time and helps your customers and stakeholders understand your direction and progress toward fulfilling the product’s goals.

There are many reasons you need a product roadmap.

  • If for no other reason, you need a roadmap for your medium-term (e.g., quarterly) planning. In this case, your roadmap is nothing more than a wish list of features with some form of prioritization. If you don’t have this – you can’t plan. 
  • Your engineers and other downstream collaborators need to be able to see further than the next 2 or 3 sprints. Knowing what’s over the short-term planning horizon will help them make more informed design decisions, optimize hiring and training, and support better resource allocation.
  • If you are a B2B product company – your salesforce needs a roadmap to understand how the product will close a competitive gap or when you will deliver a capability required by a particular customer segment. Your roadmap helps sales plan their engagements more efficiently and effectively. 
  • Enterprise (B2B) customers need a roadmap – it helps them determine whether you are progressing toward your stated product vision, and it helps them plan upgrades, expansions, or migrations. More practically, it allows them to understand where you are vs the competition in addressing their needs. 
  • Most B2B sales combine what you have in the product today and what your roadmap and vision tell the customer about where you are heading. 
  • If you are in a larger company – your leadership needs to know that you are investing the company’s finite resources in the way that gives the best return and helps attain the company’s objectives. 
  • If you are a startup, your investors/board will take an even keener interest in your investments – in many cases – it’s their money. Expect to defend your investments and the roadmap. 

If your management or investors aren’t interested in your roadmap, you may have more significant problems. I’ve experienced this when revenue and growth are the only indicators of product success. Unfortunately, revenue and growth are trailing indicators – they only expose mistakes already made in the last quarter or year. Product roadmaps (and justification and prioritization behind them) can give organizations better insights before resources are committed and potentially wasted on the wrong things. 

There are situations where you don’t need to share a roadmap beyond the immediate product team, and the roadmap is primarily a planning tool and a way to demonstrate progress to your management or investors.

  • If you’re releasing a barebones MVP to assess Product Market Fit – you don’t need a roadmap.
  • If you are a B2C product company – your customers don’t need to see a roadmap – have you ever seen a roadmap for your favorite smartphone or video game?
  • If you have a very stable product in a very stable market – your customers probably value stability over change – a roadmap is not going to be a priority and will be limited to ‘features’ that show customers that they can depend on your product to keep working the way it does (e.g., support for newer hardware or operating systems)

In short, if you’re a product company, your product roadmap is your product strategy manifest, how you plan to make the proper steps towards your goals. Everything on your roadmap should align with your goals in support of your vision and objectives.

If you think visually, this diagram may help tie vision, strategy, and roadmap together.

Who owns the Roadmap?

Product Management is ultimately responsible for maintaining the roadmap, but creating the roadmap is a collaborative effort. Your stakeholders in sales and marketing need to be aligned with your roadmap and understand the next level of detail behind the roadmap. Your stakeholders need to be sure that the roadmap is aligned with and fulfilling your vision and strategy – there needs to be a direct line between the roadmap and the strategy – if your stakeholders understand the strategy, then there should be no surprises on the roadmap because they will be fully aligned. 

Tools

I generally prefer to present roadmaps from the tool I use to create roadmaps – ProductBoard is my current favorite, but tools like Monday, Ignition, Jira Product Discovery, etc., all allow you to manage and prioritize features, align with goals and strategic objectives and pull together an interactive and professional roadmap. There are a few occasions when you may need to pull a roadmap presentation into a slide deck (board meeting, strategic customers), but your PM planning tool should be your only source of truth for the roadmap. I find using a specific roadmap/planning tool gives you more credibility – everyone knows you can throw together a roadmap slide five minutes before the meeting – using the tool that drives your planning is a different level of commitment.

Scope, detail, and uncertainty

For a fast-moving product company in a fast-moving market – a 2-3 quarter roadmap is sufficient, and anything beyond that is highly speculative. I prefer to be very explicit about that – there’s a bucket of features over the planning horizon – these things are still worth sharing – your audience (internal or external) can help you prioritize those features. Different markets and products will have different dynamics – a roadmap for a mature product in a mature market will have a much more static roadmap, and planning could extend into 6-8 quarters for major features or releases. These are generalizations, obviously – even mature products will occasionally have to be agile and quickly plan and release new features at the expense of roadmap stability. Likewise – if you are in a fast-moving segment, you will still have strategic roadmap items – like significant architectural changes or re-platforming, where the work takes longer. Hence, you need a longer planning horizon and roadmap. 

There will always be some uncertainty on a roadmap. The further out something is on the roadmap – the lower the certainty and detail. Beyond one year – my unplanned bucket is nothing more than curated feature ideas with little detail or commitment behind them. Conversely, in the near roadmap – this quarter, next quarter – many of these features should be committed, i.e., Planned – you likely have a level of detail that allows you to engage with design and engineering and may already have an execution plan (e.g. Start sprint and sizing/cost). You will have a lot more detail and may already share details such as wireframes and conceptual designs with customers and internal SMEs. My rule is that your next quarter’s roadmap should be 80-90% accurate, two to three quarters out – 50-60% accuracy, and beyond that 20-30% – ie. Largely speculation.

Finally – roadmaps are an honest attempt to share how you are executing against your stated strategy or vision. Still, the only thing certain about a roadmap is that nothing is certain about a roadmap. I always lead with the caveat that things can and will change, and many larger organizations I’ve worked with have legally-approved disclaimers on roadmaps to make it clear that they are not legally-binding commitments. Occasionally, there will be exceptions – some items on your roadmap are high-integrity obligations to customers, partners, and other internal dependent teams, but everything else can and will change depending on numerous internal and external factors – market dynamics, higher priorities, etc.

Themes and Objectives

In an ideal world – your product roadmap is your strategy manifest. It shows how you are delivering against your strategy and vision or short to medium-term progress towards your long-term goals. For any reasonably complex product or portfolio of products, your strategy will break down into themes or objectives, and your roadmap will align with those objectives. 

Roadmap Mistakes

Don’t be unrealistically specific about dates. The most accurate roadmap is the one with no dates at all – just “now,” “next,” and “later”. If you can’t get away with that (e.g., B2B), calendar quarters or halves for further out. Plans constantly change, and estimates are optimistic, so don’t delude yourself. 

If your roadmap doesn’t reflect or support your strategy or vision, then people will be inclined to think that your strategy isn’t real or you’re failing to deliver on your vision. 

If you have multiple versions of your roadmap in slide decks and documents dotted around your company intranet, they will all be out of date at some point. This will lead to confusion and busy work. You must have a single source of truth to which everyone has (at least read-only) access. 

List of disconnected features. Your roadmap is your strategy manifest, so if it’s just a scattershot of features with no apparent structure, what does that say about your strategy? Thematic roadmaps are critical for portfolio companies – the themes help your colleagues in marketing get behind a small set of impactful messages.

Conclusion

Except in some rare cases – your product needs a roadmap. Your roadmap is a tactical enforcement of your vision and strategy, and there must be obvious alignment. Organizing your roadmap under broader objectives or themes will help enforce the alignment. Product roadmaps are dynamic documents and should be reviewed constantly, and the dynamic nature of your roadmap should be clearly communicated. Given the dynamic nature – ensure there is a generally accessible single source of truth for your roadmap.  

If your Vision is the Why, and your strategy is the What, then your roadmap is the When.

The Quest For Product Market Fit

Posted on by Rich Sharples

Introduction

Defining and launching a product successfully without making at least some changes during the product development lifecycle is rare. Or, more likely – product leaders who are willing and able to adapt their product plans as they gather feedback during product definition and execution are more likely to succeed.

Product Market Fit (PMF)  is used to assess whether an offering has found its place in the market (i.e., solves real problems users have) and can support a sustainable business.

PMF isn’t just a one-time check – it is something you must do continuously, even after you have shipped a product and have seen some success. User needs rarely stay static, and successful products and companies see the signals of change and adapt. 

The Stages of Product Market Fit

The sooner you can determine good PMF, the sooner you will have the confidence to invest and build. Unfortunately, the PMF signals start weak and strengthen only as you get closer to a released product. 

Once you have made an initial product available to customers (Prototype, MVP, Beta), your signal strength increases significantly, but so does your cost and resistance to change.

Generally speaking, there are things you can and must do before you build the product and things you should do once you have shipped something to continuously monitor whether you are still relevant to the market. 

Market Validation and Sizing

The first step is to validate that there is a market for the solution you are thinking of. If you’re doing something truly disruptive and creating a new market – this will involve talking with people you believe have the problem you are trying to solve – you are trying to validate a concept. You will also need to size this market to understand the potential or TAM (Total Addressable Market) to determine if there’s a real business in solving the problem.

If you are not a true market-maker (more common), it will be much easier to determine the market potential – you may have established competitors, open source projects, or industry consensus that will validate the market need and potential size.  

Pre-product

Once you understand the market and the personas involved (users, buyers, influencers), you can start to validate whether your proposed solution and its USP (Unique Selling Points) will address the market need. That validation will likely consist of one or more of the following with increasing fidelity:

  • User/customer feedback on concepts
  • Testing the USP and Value Proposition with users/customers
  • Formal testing with wireframes, early prototypes, etc.
  • Canned demos to start explaining some of the behavior to users
  • Pre-GA releases – the sooner you can get the working product (in some state) into the end users’ hands – the better. 

The challenge at this stage is finding the right users/personas willing to commit time and provide feedback – incentives (service credits, free access to the final product, etc) may help.

During this stage, you will likely learn more about your target users and may even have to re-consider your target personas in light of what you learn. The feedback you receive may also require you to change how you talk about the product and may need to refine and refocus your USPs.

Post-product

As I mentioned at the top of the article – the PMF signals get stronger the closer you get to a released product, and until the user can try the product in-context you may still need some critical validation.   There are many factors aside from the core product that can affect user acceptance and validation:

  • Price – you may have validated PMF in the context of a free offering. Putting a price on something changes how the user thinks about the product.
  • Form – you may have validated the offering as a standalone feature (vs embedded as part of a platform) or a software vs service or dedicated hardware device. 
  • Availability – your procurement and onboarding process may add additional friction unacceptable to your target user/buyer.
  • Market Access – you may have engaged with some initial target users, but does your salesforce/ sales channel give you access to the market you need?

Just because you have shipped a product and found at least some success validating PMF – don’t stop listening to the market and your customers/users. This is where tools like NPS or The 40% rule (aka Ellis Test) can be helpful to ensure your offering and the market aren’t diverging over time.

Who is responsible for assessing PMF?

Determining PMF is a team sport. It likely starts with and is spearheaded by Product Management and Product Marketing during discovery and development but will ultimately require support from User Research, Sales, Customer Success, and other groups in the organization. 

Ongoing assessment of market fit will come through your Customer Sucess or Growth teams as they constantly monitor the performance of the product (NPS, Rule of 40%) and ultimately, your sales, sales-ops, and finance team looking at signals such as ARR growth,  LTV (Lifetime Value) to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio. Note – revenue or revenue-based derivatives may be  good measures of PMF but it happens way too late in the product lifecycle to be use exclusively. 

Conclusion

Shipping any product or even substantial features without validation during discovery and development is highly risky and will likely result in expsnive and disruptive pivots.

The PMF signals strengthen as you get closer to a released product, but you should still start as early as possible with customer/user sessions around concepts, ideas, and USPs because the costs of changing your focus and product plans increase substantially once you have released something to the market.