How to Prioritize Features for Your Next Software Product?

1. Loudest stakeholder first

This is frequently the main cause of improper product prioritization. As rightly said, a bad apple spoils the bunch. You aim to appease the stakeholder who believes they know where the ship should sail, the loudest and most foolish customer, or the one who pays the highest price. You choose to follow this in each of these situations based on the anxiety they generate.

2. Overestimating the importance of new features

While new features can be exciting, overestimating their importance can lead to problems. Software product teams sometimes prioritize new features over essential ones, resulting in a flawed product. To prevent this, it is important to evaluate the actual impact of new features and consider how they align with overall business goals.

When considering the importance of new features, conducting a cost-benefit analysis is essential. This analysis should not only focus on the potential benefits of the new feature but also take into account the resources required for its development and maintenance. By weighing the costs and benefits, product teams can make more informed decisions about which features to prioritize.

3. Ignoring user feedback in the prioritization process

One of the common mistakes is to overlook the valuable insights or feedback users give. Ignoring user feedback leads to misalignment between the product’s features and the actual needs and preferences of customers. To avoid this mistake, it is crucial to actively seek feedback and use tools like surveys and user interviews to gather valuable insights.

It’s important to note that user feedback is not a one-time activity but an ongoing process. Regular user engagement via feedback channels will help the team to stay informed and updated about the user’s needs. By incorporating feedback into the prioritization process, companies can ensure that their product roadmap remains relevant and better user experience. 

5 feature prioritization frameworks

It’s time to start the process after we’ve done some “soul-searching” for the software product. You can carry several feature prioritization frameworks in your toolbox. While some of them concentrate more on the feature’s urgency, others are more concerned with the value-to-effort ratio. Silver bullets are obsolete, particularly in today’s customer-focused environment. Product managers must be adept at using a particular prioritization framework and must know all of these techniques by heart to make the best decision possible at any given time.

These are a few of the most important ones:

1. MoSCoW technique 

The MoSCoW method is a widely used framework for feature prioritization in product management, with the acronym for Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have. It is trendy among stakeholders as it helps clarify the importance of various initiatives within a specific release.

This framework divides features into four categories:

• Must-haves: Non-negotiable features that are essential for the product.
• Should-haves: Important features that add significant value but are not critical.
• Could-haves: Desirable features that are nice to have but not essential.
• Won’t-haves: Lower-priority features that will not be included in the current release.

The primary goal is to assign each feature to one of these categories to ensure clear communication of priorities and goals.

Before applying the MoSCoW framework, stakeholders and the product manager need to align on the overall goals, product strategy, and prioritization criteria. Once consensus is reached, they can address any potential conflicts within the product team and make informed decisions on resource allocation for each category.

2. RICE framework

The RICE framework helps evaluate potential features by focusing on four key areas:

• Reach: The number of customers a particular feature is expected to impact.
• Impact: The anticipated effect of the feature, rated on a scale from 0.25 (minimal) to 3 (significant).
• Confidence: The degree of certainty based on available data or analysis, ensuring decisions are grounded in evidence.
• Effort: The estimated time required to implement the feature, measured as effort per person, per month.

RICE is an acronym for these factors, and once all the relevant data is gathered, you can calculate the RICE score using the following formula to prioritize features:

RICE Score= Effort x Reach × Impact × Confidence

This method provides product managers with a clear, quantitative overview of their feature forecasts. While the RICE framework offers an objective approach to prioritization, it may not always be the most suitable method for every situation. However, it is highly effective when seeking an impartial, data-driven approach to identifying high-impact features.

3. Impact vs Effort Matrix

If you prefer visual tools for product prioritization, the Impact vs. Effort Matrix is an ideal framework. This method visually represents each feature based on technical analysis and product evaluation, assigning points to each feature individually.

Features are plotted on a Cartesian matrix, with Effort on the X-axis and Impact on the Y-axis. This provides a clear, visual overview of your product roadmap, making it easy to assess priorities at a glance. By using this technique, teams can more effectively prioritize features, paving the way for optimal solutions that can be easily communicated to stakeholders.

4. Priority Scorecard

The Priority Scorecard allows product managers and their teams to assess the importance of each feature by creating customized categories.

Start by assigning weighted values to each category in collaboration with team members. Then, provide each participant with 100 points to distribute according to their preferences. After thorough discussion to ensure consensus, the team can allocate points and establish feature priorities.

A useful tip is to divide product teams and technical teams into separate groups, applying the same feature list for classification using the Scorecard. This approach streamlines the feature prioritization process, helping to identify impactful features that resonate with customers.

5. Opportunity Scoring

Opportunity Scoring, or opportunity or gap analysis, is a feature prioritization framework that identifies features that users consider important and underdeveloped. By leveraging customer feedback, this method helps teams discover new opportunities while minimizing risks.

Features that are rated as highly important but have low user satisfaction should be prioritized for improvement. Conversely, features that score low in both importance and satisfaction may be de-prioritized, allowing resources and creative efforts to be redirected toward more impactful initiatives.

How to choose the right prioritization framework for software product 

Selecting the appropriate prioritization framework for your team requires careful consideration of several key factors. These include the project’s objectives, product complexity, team expertise, and the availability of relevant data.

For example, if the primary goal is to enhance customer satisfaction, frameworks like Opportunity Scoring may be particularly effective, as they prioritize features based on potential impact. However, if the team is still developing its skills or navigating a new product landscape, the Value vs. Effort framework may be more suitable, allowing the team to focus on delivering high-value features with manageable levels of effort.

Choosing the right framework ensures that prioritization efforts are aligned with both the team’s capabilities and the project’s goals, leading to more informed and effective decision-making.

Adapting to change: Agile prioritization techniques

In today’s dynamic market, the ability to quickly adapt to change is essential for product success. Agile prioritization techniques allow product teams to remain flexible and responsive to evolving customer needs and market conditions. By embracing agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban, teams can continuously prioritize features based on real-time customer feedback and shifting business demands.

A fundamental aspect of agile prioritization is the use of user stories with concise, clear descriptions of features from the perspective of the end user. These user stories enable teams to understand and prioritize customer needs effectively, ensuring that features deliver maximum value. By breaking down large features into manageable user stories, teams can focus on incremental delivery, ensuring each feature provides tangible value to users.

Another key agile prioritization technique is MoSCoW prioritization, which classifies features into four categories: Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have. This approach helps teams clearly distinguish between essential and non-essential features, making it easier to allocate resources to high-priority areas. MoSCoW prioritization is particularly useful when faced with competing demands, ensuring that critical features are delivered first while lower-priority features can be considered for future development.

Conclusion

Building new features is always exciting, as it fuels the vision of your product’s growth and the potential results it can deliver. However, it’s equally important to establish a realistic long-term strategy grounded in key criteria. The following are essential considerations to keep in mind during the prioritization process:

• Feasibility requires input from key technical team members, including front-end developers, back-end engineers, and UI designers. Their expertise is essential to assess the technical complexity and resource requirements of a given feature.
• Desirability focuses on the customer experience, examining the needs of end-users, interaction elements, affordances, and how the product should be positioned in the market. Insights on desirability come from UX designers, researchers, marketers, and strategists, who help ensure that the product resonates with its target audience.
• Viability is a broader business consideration, involving input from the product manager and relevant executives. It takes into account factors such as the regulatory environment, legal considerations, industry trends, and financial oversight, ensuring that the feature aligns with the company’s long-term business strategy.

If you have any questions about prioritizing features for your next product, please don’t hesitate to contact us.