feature prioritization formula
Hi All i know that there is no standard formula that works well with everyone really. i was wanting to at the least come up with a skeleton of a formula sto start with to help priortize features taling into account the revenue, profit, desirability, effort, etc. Does microsoft, apple, facebook, amazon, google product managers have any formula.!! thanks !!!
Work backwards from the customer and don’t emphasize profit or revenue. That can come later. Always work on delivering a better experience for the customer, no matter what.
Agreed that this is a very nuanced topic and a single formula is certainly possible, but maybe not useful. And agree it's worth reading much more on it. Possessing a deep understanding of your customer, your business, and how your product delivers value to your customers and your business will help you make better choices. And it is a competition. You want to drive value up the fastest for the lowest cost compared to your perfect competitor. Because all of those products in your market or adjacent ones you may expand in to are run by product managers, too. Great question to ask, you're already on the right track. Cost of delay comes from Don Reinertsen. Also check out Clay Christiansen, Eric Ries, Salim Ismael, Eric von Hipple, Don Norman, and many more who deserve to be in this list. Whatever else you can get your hands on. Formula: knowledge = power. Hope that answer helps!
Something i love doing and can talk at length about. Step 1 is to have goals that work backwards from the customer and something that all impacted stakeholders align on and not just you. Something like #1 goal is to improve customer experience, #2 goal is to improve speed, or something. Key is..everyone must be aligned to it as a marching order. Step 2 make a weighted prioritization formula based on these goals and few other factors. Step 3: For each factor define a 1-5 scale.... so a feature scores 1 is this and 5 if this. Step 4: consider cost of doing it(time/complexity/money) and have a scale for that as well. Step 5: determine how to use the cost...you could divide total score by cost (idea is to deliver features thag impact your goal the most in shortest time first). Step 6: formula done and experiment with feature scoring. It will force you to be creative and breakdown features to MVP so they get bubble up first. Is this perfect, no. Its a start. Try it for 6 months, adjust. Rinse repeat.
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And don't worry too much about this advice. Follow any advice, do what the competition is doing, best case you'll be a pale imitation of someone else. Focus on the people and the problems that inescapably draw you in and solve them in the way that only you can. There's no formula for what makes you yourself and that's an edge in any market.
I would say it heavily depends on the maturity of the products you are working on, and on how quickly those new features are effectively adopted. Look up "cost of delay". That's what I generally use as a guideline to prioritize over features of the same level of impact.