How To Prioritise Features for Your Product
Prioritisation is tricky — it’s a constant balancing of what your business wants, what your customers expect, and what your team can realistically deliver in a short amount of time. Not easy!
But don’t worry, in this post, we’ll talk about the 3 step process to prioritising features for your MVP and how you can take your team on the product journey.
Let’s get to it…
Feature Prioritisation Sits at the Planning Phase of the Product Lifecycle
This process starts after you have completed the validation phase and conduct a high-level scoping exercise using feature mapping.
After this phase, you will head into the detailed scoping phase where you get into the details of the design and technical solution.
Here are 3 Steps To Prioritise Your Product Features
- Prioritise each feature by value
- Estimate the effort of each feature idea
- Use the value vs effort framework to gain consensus on the MVP
These steps can be completed in one meeting or across multiple sessions.
Do this with your team. The journey is just as important as the outcome.
1) Prioritise Each Feature By Value
Value breaks down into two areas: Business value and Customer value.
Starting with the value allows your team to align on the definition of ‘value’ from their perspective.
Set up a workshop with the people who can contribute to each of the two areas. The usual suspects are:
- A technical lead or developers who will be working on the solution
- Design lead or UX lead who can contribute to the experience
- Stakeholders that can decide on business value (PM, CEO, GM, etc.)
- A domain expert that knows about the customer value (PM, UX, or a Department representative)
