#ProductDevelopment #FeaturePrioritization #SaaS #Feedback
Hey everyone! 👋 How do you prioritize feature requests when building your product? 🛠️ I’m currently working on a SaaS solution for businesses and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the feature requests coming in from users.
Here’s the situation:
– I have some early users giving me feedback
– I’ve convinced a few companies to actively use the product
– I’m struggling to decide which features to prioritize
Any advice on how to handle this dilemma? 🤔 Here’s what I’m thinking of doing:
– Consider the impact of the feature on the overall user experience
– Evaluate the engineering effort required to implement the feature
– Count the number of requests for the same feature to determine its importance
What do you think? How do you approach prioritizing feature requests in your own projects? Let’s share some insights and tips! 💡 #ProductManagement #UserFeedback
Don’t build something because people ask for it. Build something because people need it.
You need to talk to your customers to understand which use cases they are trying to achieve with these feature requests. Then you need to find the use case that gives your company the most growth (e.g. because you can easily find additional customers with the same use case). And then you need to solve that use case (which doesn’t necessarily mean that you build the exact set of features that you were asked to).
There are features that probably complement what you have already and there are one’s that are their own standalone thing,you should prioritise the ones that will complement your product
Out of all your customers there is a profile of your ideal customer. Work with the finance , marketing and CEO to define what is your ideal customer. And then prioritize the features most important to them or the features that will tend to bring in more of them. For example if in your financial model you want more midsize to enterprise customers and they are requesting some sort of governance or enterprise ready feature that is unimportant to your small business customer you prioritize that feature … but if your ideal customer is more like the smb you prioritize their requests. That’s just baseline there are many factors depending on what stage you are at. If you are just coming out of the beta phase and you need to validate product market fit… you need to get to your 1st 10-20 sales of what you’ve got from people who are not friendly to get a better sense of what to prioritize
There will always be more features you can add/fine-tune. What is the process your product facilitates? What is the end value? A feature request can just be a signal of a pinpoint in the process, which the feature may or may not solve. Different feature requests may all be related to the same pain point.
As others commented, **meeting and talking with your customers to discover more granularly why they are asking for different features should give you more data on how to prioritize.** And then there are lots of frameworks for prioritization, don’t get caught up here. Impact vs Effort is usually good enough.
Let me suggest a book to you: Continuous Discovery by Teresa Torres. It explains the concept of an “opportunity solution tree.” Basically, you decide on the business outcome you are trying to achieve, and then evaluate opportunities according to how well they advance that outcome. This way you are ultimately deciding based on what is good for both your users AND your business.
Taking user requests at face value is a very dangerous game. Much better as others have said: understand the underlying need or problem, and solve for that.
Can you run a ranking survey? Examples at https://www.opinionx.co
Oh this one’s a classic
“Build to sell, don’t sell to build”
Another one I like is “Be customer founded, and customer driven”
Like others said
1. Make sure you know exactly who your ICP is
2. Identify requests from said ICP
3. Identify requests that matter to their bottom line
I like to prioritize with an excel sheet (or Linear) with two attributes. “Difficulty” and “Value for Customer” with the values “high”, “medium” and “low”. Start with high value and low effort then move on.
(Also try to solve a mix of bugs in between)
This is where a great UX strategist with a strong background in UX Research would be incredibly valuable to you. The trick is not just to build something people ask you for, but what their end users actually need that will solve real problems. UX Research should help you uncover ways your product can improve the lives of your end users.