How can you avoid prioritizing the wrong product features during development?

Defining a clear product vision and strategy is crucial to ensure that the development team focuses on the right priorities. I have personally relied on some of these below-mentioned aspects to help my customers define clear product vision: 1. Ask relevant questions to the customers to understand the market they are operating in and end users 2. Prioritize Core features otherwise, we would never get the product done 3. Defining user personas followed by user stories is the next best thing to do 4. Never forget to analyze and understand your competitors. It helps you define many key aspects of your strategy

Before embarking on feature development, establish a shared understanding of your product's essence, target audience, and problem-solving approach through a clear product vision and strategy. These guiding principles, communicated through tools like vision statements, product roadmaps, and OKRs, steer prioritization and alignment with customer needs and business objectives. This shared clarity facilitates effective decision-making and keeps the development process focused on delivering value to the intended audience, ensuring the product's success in addressing market demands and staying aligned with long-term goals.

Before we go deeper, its fundamental to have a clear product vision and strategic roadmap that aligns and resonates well with your development team, illustrates the priorities and guides holistic journey of your product. Focus on prioritizing core features that embodies the product's vision and address the primary needs of your users to maintain momentum and avoid scope creep. Consider defining user personas and narratives to resonate and make informed product decisions by ensuring the user experience at the forefront of your design and development process. Understanding your competition is non-negotiable and helps you in shedding light on untapped opportunities, refine product strategy, market positioning, and value proposition.

Have in mind, that you do not create products or services, you develop solutions, for your customer needs. Once you have identified the areas of improvement the first steps are: Align your new development to your Mision, Vision, AGBH, SWOT and CAME, Strategic Planning, short term objectives, OKRs and do not forget Contingencies. Build up your initial team, be sure everybody is aligned with previous issues and stablish the plan of action with KPIs and feedback tasks. FIVE MISTAKES TO AVOID 1. Commercial #goal, it has to be #clear 2. Build the right #team, aligned people/resources 3. Excellency on #design, listen to your market 4. Right level of #integration 5. Customer focus, #undertand their needs

Prevent prioritizing the wrong features by validating assumptions and hypotheses through concrete evidence and data rather than mere opinions. Utilize methods like customer interviews, surveys, experiments, and analytics to rigorously test ideas and gather valuable feedback. This approach ensures that product decisions are rooted in reality, allowing you to identify and prioritize the most impactful features for your customers. By eliminating assumptions and focusing on validated insights, you align your product development with genuine customer needs, enhancing the likelihood of overall product success.

A MVP is a product that includes only the essential features needed to captivate early adopter customers and validate the product concept in its early stages. The MVP serves as a tool for the product team to gather customer input and feedback as soon as possible, allowing for the identification and resolution of any issues that may arise. To begin designing your MVP, it is crucial to ensure that it aligns with your business's objectives and goals. Once your MVP is built, it is important to share it with your intended audience through various platforms, such as social media posts and personalised emails. Analysing the performance of your MVP will provide valuable user feedback on your product idea.

Invest in data management and validation, the worst project is the one based on wrong assumptions or unaccrued information. Consider software tools that could help you validate your hypotheses and consider different points of view from: ✅ Customer focus groups ✅ Mkt and Sales teams (trends) ✅ Competence market analysis ✅ Production and I&D internal teams ✅ Suppliers and business partners ✅ Analytical cost departments ✅ Regulation and register departments ✅ Legal and Compliance departments Some products or services would fall under "nice to have" but costs, regulations and impact on sales could end in a no action decision. Other products could be "feasible to make or improve" and those ones continue in the funnel plan up to launch.

A prioritization framework should be simple. Instead of jargons like MoSCoW, Kano, RICE, etc. use something that works for you best. These jargons are good on paper and are rarely very practical as product management is all about making decisions sometimes in not an objective manner and that's what sets product managers apart. I recommend a prioritization frame work involving the following: 1. First and foremost if the feature aligns with your company/product vision 2. User Impact - It can be the number or percentage of your users that it impacts and what is the scale of the impact 3. Urgency - Why is it important to build it now and not later 4. Return on Investment - Costs should include engineering bandwidth, external integration, etc.

To enhance feature prioritization, leverage a structured framework or technique such as the MoSCoW method, RICE score, Kano model, or value vs. effort matrix. The choice depends on your specific context and objectives. Adopting a systematic approach enables transparent evaluation, balancing factors like value, cost, risk, and impact. These frameworks empower your team to make informed decisions, ensuring resources are allocated efficiently. Ultimately, a well-chosen prioritization technique aligns product development with broader business goals, enhancing the overall effectiveness of feature selection and implementation.

Support your product development on knowledge management and look for tools that help you handle the information from different sources. Fibery can help you organize the flow of information, from multiple department software's, inside the company. Consider a prioritization framework from a structured approach to decision-making and eliminate the human bias, by adoption of matrices to rank product features. PRIORIZATION TECHNIQUES: ✅ Cost of delay ✅ Kano model ✅ MoSCoW ✅ RICE framework ✅ Value vs. effort matrix ✅ Priority Poker (small groups) ✅ Product tree

Involving the team and stakeholders in the product development process is essential for ensuring that the right features are prioritized. Here are some strategies to improve collaboration and avoid setting up the wrong vision: 1. Stakeholder Workshops: Conduct brainstorming sessions with key stakeholders to understand what success means to them 2. Cross-Functional Collaboration: These workshops must encourage collaboration between different departments to gauge broader perspectives 3. Do Iterative & and continuous discussions/improvement till everybody is aligned with the vision

Engaging the team and stakeholders, making data-driven choices, and seeking individual input are pivotal for sound feature prioritization. By asking each stakeholder and team member about their expectations from the product, you uncover diverse perspectives and needs. Implementing a robust product analytics layer and consistently revisiting usage data and reports empower data-backed decisions. This iterative approach ensures that feature prioritization is driven by actual user behavior and feedback, resulting in a product that truly addresses user demands and aligns with business objectives.

Not everything a product manager believes is necessarily true (in fact, very few things are). Utilizing the team and stakeholders to validate hypotheses is crucial. Diverse perspectives enhance conclusions compared to solitary decision-making. While the product manager ultimately decides, a collaboratively built decision is easier to justify.

Prioritizing product features requires collaboration; involve your team and stakeholders to gather diverse input and insights. Tap into their expertise to avoid biases and blind spots. While managing expectations, ensure decisions are based on value and importance, not just authority or urgency. Techniques like voting, scoring, or ranking aid in fostering collaboration and reaching consensus. By incorporating various perspectives, you enhance the validity of prioritization decisions, leading to a more balanced and informed approach that aligns with both team expertise and overall business goals.

The purpose of feature prioritization is to determine the order in which you will develop features, following your product roadmap. You need to involve product managers, customers, senior management and stakeholders, to focus on the factors that matter from a business perspective and decide what to do and when. Never under look stakeholder input, errors on this behavior can end up on future lost sales or avoid new customers capture.

Al planificar el desarrollo de una nueva feature, ya sea una extensión o un producto de datos nuevo, es esencial establecer OKR que se esperan alcanzar después de un período de uso. Cada entrega debe estar respaldada por la generación de un ROI, que no necesariamente se traduce siempre en términos financieros. En situaciones en las que no es posible vincular un KPI, es fundamental considerar la inclusión de algunos de estos factores: Reducción de costos, ya sea en términos de infraestructura, procesos o retrabajos. Mitigación de vulnerabilidades. Disminución de alertas y solicitudes de soporte. Mejora de la productividad. Aumento de la velocidad de los procesos. Mejora en la calidad de los datos.

Prioritizing product features is an ongoing process that demands frequent review and adjustment. Adapt to changing customer needs, market dynamics, and feedback by continually monitoring feature performance. Stay vigilant for new opportunities and threats impacting your product strategy. Employ tools like product reviews, retrospectives, and metrics to systematically evaluate and update priorities. This iterative approach ensures alignment with evolving circumstances, allowing your product strategy and vision to remain dynamic and responsive to market demands and challenges.

The best way to focus on problems instead of solutions to avoid prioritizing the wrong product features is look to what core users are complaining about. If your app is on GitHub, this will come from Issues & Discussions. If it is on an app store, problems manifest in user reviews. Whatever the source, prioritize addressing those issues and you will have built features actual users want & immediately benefit from.

Two questions take priority whenever prioritizing 1. What is the problem we are trying to solve? 2. Does that align with my product vision and strategy? If the answer is “No” we don’t spent any more time on that feature. If Yes then we can dive deeper into quantitative data(if available), user feedback, alignment with metrics, etc…. In my experience I’ve found that keeping those two questions at the top of the discussion, removes a lot of the churn and unnecessary negotiation, its just important to remind all stakeholders of what our collective goals are.

BASICS: Identify the problem and solve it ¿BUT HOW? Integrate customer product testers or beta users, with prototypes, and feedback loops after each improvement is done, to assure the requirement was fulfilled. OUTSIDE THE BOX USERS Sometimes people involved in a day-to-day project tend to be "blind" and do not see things that are obvious. Support your findings with: 👉 Surveys, what’s stops people from performing a specific action?. Incorporate Qualaroo on your page and ask them. 👉 Support transcripts, find out why people are reaching out and asking for help? (lack of instructions, confusion, frustration) and please do not use a bot, to give 101 support and solve their problems!

If your app does not have enough traction for user reviews to exist thus insight cannot be extracted, consider coding a menu or UI link to share feedback so you can focus on features that address what users actually want.

When prioritizing backlog items, it's essential to distinguish between must-have features and nice-to-have features. The must-have features are those that directly address critical business needs, while the nice-to-have features can be deprioritized or postponed. By focusing on the vital few, you can narrow down the backlog to the most valuable items and allocate resources more efficiently.