How to Choose the Best Features for Your Product – 1st part

The art of prioritizing is encapsulated in the feature development process with competency and time being the crucial foundation of the process. The development process involves honing your skills and time to develop features to avoid miscalculations. The question is, how can you decide on the evaluation criteria required for your product while striving to increase strategic indicators, offer customers more value, establish all internal processes in the team, and achieve other illustrative indicators via qualitative prioritization?

Like best IT teams, we strive to combine the top-quality aspects of development. For that, we are sharing our vision of how to prioritize features in LS Intranet – the corporate solution for development and other teams.

Why your product/company won’t survive without prioritization?

The product management consists of three main phases:

User research

Planning

Execution

At the planning phase we “sculpt” the image of the future product. It is crucial to include all materials that will improve the performance of our product, its profitability, UX, UI and so on.

And we won’t palter as a lot of product managers are obsessed with this “modeling,” with the ability to influence the final product.

Distracting factors kill start-ups. Construction for the sake of construction is suicidal for SMBs. Therefore, the presence of a rigorous and honest prioritization process necessitates a functional development model that focuses attention on eliminating unnecessary distractions.

It’s easy to take and spend invaluable team time for developing features nobody needs. This affects startups significantly since resources (time and money) that are imperative for the growth are limited.

One who believes that the newly added feature will immediately cause a magnetic effect on potential clients is mistaken.

Let’s talk about our development process:

Everything is simple: we take two months to set goals that are paramount in choosing metrics for controlling, collecting and selecting ideas that can improve the development process. Then, we conduct lean prioritization of ideas, establish features’ scorecards, and finally put down the functional specification for features that have won. That’s all – the features are ready for development.

Systematized process:

1. Formulate the company’s goals for two months
2. Choose metrics for monitoring goals
3. Collect and organize ideas
4. Carry out continuous lean-prioritization
5. Do scoring of features
6. Create detail drawings of the features and add them to the queue

Delving Deeper into the Development Process:

Formulating Goals

We have a 2-week trial for the product. We want to increase the number of companies that buy the paid subscription after a trial. This is our main goal for the next two months. We also need , as there are around 50 intranet systems for project management on the market.

We have basic metric and auxiliary ones. It is important that all these metrics be in our zone of influence.

The basic metric is a trial-to-paid conversion.

Minor metrics:

AHA-moment is the moment when the user understands the value of the product.

Each product has its value. For example, for Tinder this is a successful messaging, for Facebook is viewing newsfeed for some time.

The users who have experienced the value of the product are called activated. Our task is to increase the number of such users (activated users). Guys from Facebook counted and found out that activation is affected by the number of friends – the more friends one has, the bigger the newsfeed is, and so is the time this user hangs in the newsfeed enabling him to see more ads.

Collecting ideas

Here are the main resources of feedback for our product:

Support systems for users (customer support: Intercom.com)

NPS – every month we ask a question – How likely will you recommend us to friends or colleagues?

Product analytics (Power BI) – review the analyst and formulate new hypotheses.

Analysis of competitors – carefully read all the announcements of competitors and learn their new features.

Interviews (Custdev.com, Temi.com, Rev.com) – record audio interviews and then do transcription

A/B tests

Reviews – use the App Store, Google Play, Capterra.com, Appfollow.io, or Appannie.com

UX testing

Surveys and p

Organizing ideas

Since we have a lot of feedback, we constantly put things right in our product backlog. This enables us to concentrate on the important things and ignore the unnecessary distractions.

How we structure our product backlog:

By components (backend, frontend, API, mobile apps)

By the field of application (UX, marketing, tech debts, bugs)

By noting with the “flags” the most strategically important

By linking insights and features to understand the relevance of features

We link all the customers’ requests to corresponding features. For example, a function request has been received via Intercom. The support manager adds it to the board, and the product manager further links the request with the particular features of interest. Thus, we estimate for how much particular feature will be in demand.