How to Prioritize Features: A Framework from Feature Demand Generation to Feature Prioritization

Hi community, I would like to share with you some knowledge and a framework that I developed as product person behind Passbase. Prioritization is the most critical part of building a company towards product-market fit and beyond. Your limited time won’t allow you to make mistakes that take 3–4 months away from your runway by building a feature that nobody wants. Wrong product decisions might cost a company its life. Your job as CPO, VP of product, head of product or product manager is to narrow down feature requests to a focused fraction that is hyper examined from multiple angles to make your decision more robust. Quality decisions for the next feature start with the appropriate quantity of feature requests in the pipeline. Without rich data of feature requests & demand, you are fishing in the dark. Your prioritization work starts with building a healthy request pipeline. Start to Establish a Product Feature Pipeline Three essential blocks need to be established in your workflow to create and to increase a product feature pipeline health (PFPH) — a term you might not heart off yet. PFPH indicates the future demand for your product and potential product growth — an angle investors also should use to judge your product potential. In the following article, I will walk you through how to set up the workflow from feature request generation to prioritizing them down. A feature prioritization framework will help to establish a standardized angle of how requests are evaluated and prioritized. If you have issues with roadmap clarity, evaluating requests and its communication of those priorities, this framework will help you guide and articulate your product prioritization. Turn your Company into a Feature Request Engine The more you can increase a culture of feature ideation and simultaneously reduce the friction of submitting ideas, the higher is the chance to create a healthy feature request pipeline and build out a product that people want. We at Passbase opened the door to everyone from external to internal stakeholders to submit product ideas, features and feedback. This helped us to generate a healthy product feature pipeline and also increased the bond between our customers and Passbase. Transparency on the future feature outlook even helped to convert customers. How to Develop a Healthy Product Feature Pipeline Sales talks about a client health pipeline to showcase the future revenue potential, and this is what you have to do from a product perspective for future features as well. Feature requests should come from multiple channels to generate a broad facette and diverse snapshot of feature demands. Those should be separated into External Requests and Internal Requests. Let’s break those down to give you new tools and ideas for your organization: Sales: Sales conversations are the major channel to gather feedback and voice from current clients a ... Read more here How to Prioritize Features: A Framework from Feature Demand Generation to Feature Prioritization