Feature prioritization determines the order in which teams develop and release product features. It is a key process in product management. Feature prioritization also balances customer value, business goals and technical feasibility to help product managers focus on the most impactful features. Strategic frameworks like the RICE method and Kano model for feature prioritization help teams align projects with the brand's objectives and technical constraints.
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Feature prioritization stands as a cornerstone process in product management and UX (user experience) design. It determines which features a design team should implement first to maximize a product's value. This process is not just about selecting the most appealing features. It's a strategic decision-making approach that aligns product development with business objectives and customer needs. As designers and product managers delve into product feature prioritization frameworks, methods and tools, they focus on maximizing value and aligning with stakeholders’ expectations. This helps them to shape compelling product experiences that can lead to increased customer loyalty and increase revenue.
To determine which features will deliver the most value to customers is a critical aspect of feature prioritization. It calls for a strategic plan. When brands focus on customer-centric development, they can better meet market demands and enhance user satisfaction. Successful feature prioritization requires a shared vision and clear company goals. This shared vision helps team members debate the merits of each feature more objectively. It therefore reduces the influence of personal biases and ensures that product decisions stand in line with strategic business objectives.
Feature prioritization is crucial for brands to organize and rank features based on various criteria such as customer value, business goals and technical viability. Product managers need a structured approach to help them focus on the most important features, and to facilitate a more efficient and targeted development process. Product teams must understand the relative importance of each feature before they can move to effective prioritization. This understanding helps them allocate resources appropriately. It also ensures that design and development teams work to release the most impactful features first.
The question of how to prioritize feature requests also demands teams to strive for a balance between user needs, technical feasibility and market trends. This balance ensures that the features they develop are not only what users desire but are also technically feasible and market-relevant. To make the right features a priority at the right time is a vital way to help maximize a product’s or service’s success in a competitive landscape.
This is one way to rate and rank where to invest time and effort.
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Effective feature prioritization in product management offers a multitude of benefits. These streamline the development process and boost product success. When brands meticulously select which features to develop based on a variety of strategic factors, they can optimize their resources and align their product development efforts with solid business goals and user expectations. More specifically, some main benefits of proper feature prioritization are that it:
Feature prioritization equips product teams with the ability to make informed decisions. It significantly reduces guesswork and internal disagreements. When teams evaluate features against quantifiable metrics, they can objectively decide which features will drive the most value. This simplifies the decision-making process.
To adopt a goal-first approach in feature prioritization not only clarifies the process. It also establishes a repeatable method that the entire product team can adopt. This consistency ensures that all team members are on the same page. That is crucial for a brand to maintain strategic alignment throughout the project lifecycle.
When teams use quantifiable metrics to score potential value of features, it enables them to make data-driven decisions. This approach facilitates transparent communication about why they should prioritize specific features. It therefore helps to align and motivate all stakeholders involved in the development process.
Effective prioritization allows for the efficient allocation of both the team’s time and the company’s resources. When brands focus on fewer, more impactful projects, they can maximize their output while they avoid or minimize wasted efforts on less critical features.
To align tasks with the company’s broader strategic goals is another significant benefit of effective feature prioritization. This strategic focus ensures that day-to-day activities are not just busy work but contribute directly to the long-term objectives of the organization.
CEO of Experience Dynamics, Frank Spillers discusses important aspects of UX strategy plans:
For product managers who need to juggle numerous tasks, effective feature prioritization can significantly reduce stress. As it clearly defines what teams need to do next, the process helps to manage vast and varied responsibilities.
Feature prioritization directly impacts customer satisfaction as it ensures that teams develop and release the most requested and valuable features first. This not only enhances the user experience and proves brand empathy with the customer. It also keeps customer-facing teams like sales and support satisfied. Teams can meet customer demands more effectively and thereby increase customer satisfaction for their products and services.
See why empathy is a vital ingredient in design:
When product managers and teams make research-driven prioritization decisions, it ensures that the features they develop meet both user needs and business goals. This judicious use of data justifies the time and resources a brand spends when they develop new features. Therefore, each decision becomes an investment in the product’s future.
To avoid decisions based merely on intuition, brands should drive decisions about feature prioritization with data, user research and market trends. This approach helps to identify features that not only meet current user needs but are also viable from a technical and business perspective.
Feature prioritization often involves collaborative decision-making, which ensures diverse perspectives come into consideration and there is broad buy-in across the organization. This inclusivity can lead to more innovative solutions and greater commitment from team members.
Watch as UX Designer and Author of Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups, Laura Klein explains important aspects of collaboration, in this case in cross-functional Agile teams.
Regular re-prioritization of features allows teams to adapt quickly to changing business needs or market conditions. This flexibility is crucial to maintain relevance and competitiveness in rapidly evolving industries.
Prioritization ensures that teams build the right features at the right time, which maximizes product impact and market success. This timely development can be crucial for brands to capitalize on market opportunities and meet user expectations.
When teams clearly prioritize features, they can iterate and release new features more quickly. This agility allows companies to respond swiftly to user feedback and continuously improve their product.
Feature prioritization is essential to manage the scope of projects. When teams clearly define what is necessary, they can avoid the pitfalls of feature creep, which can dilute the product’s value and exhaust resources.
Features that surprise and exceed what users and customers expect can set a product apart from its competitors. They can more than satisfy customers, and foster a strong, loyal customer base among their target market. When brands focus on features that offer the most value and differentiation, they can stay ahead of their competitors and capture a larger share of the market. They might even account well for all seven factors of UX in the most rewarding way through a highly popular product.
Watch as Psychologist Ditte Hvas Mortensen explains the Seven Key Factors of UX:
In the dynamic world of product management, it’s crucial to choose the right feature prioritization tool or feature prioritization framework to align product development with strategic business goals and customer needs. This selection depends on several factors, including the organization's culture, industry, product life cycle and available resources.
Several frameworks are particularly helpful. It's essential for product teams to understand these dynamics to effectively apply the most suitable framework and therefore leverage the best feature prioritization techniques.
This method scores features based on their potential reach, impact on users, confidence in achieving the desired outcome, and the effort required. It helps teams focus on features that offer the most significant potential impact relative to their cost.
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This approach evaluates features by weighing their benefits against the required effort to implement them. It aims to identify features that offer the most value with the least effort, and optimize the allocation of resources.
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Teams categorize features into must-haves, performance enhancers and delighters. This model prioritizes features based on customer satisfaction. It also helps to identify features that can significantly enhance the user experience.
The Kano Model helps sort and chart features to prioritize.
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Teams classify features into four categories: Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won't have. This method helps teams focus on essential features that need immediate attention.
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Team members vote for the best features via the MoSCoW framework.
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Teams organize features into a user story map that shows how each feature fits into the overall product strategy. This method is useful to maintain a clear focus on strategic alignment and user experience.
An example of a story map.
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Laura Klein explains user stories in this video:
For example, a local food delivery app might use the RICE framework to prioritize features. The brand might want to improve order tracking or optimize delivery routes, and focus on changes that reach a large user base and have a high impact on service efficiency.
Companies like SafeBoda in Uganda utilize prioritization to strategically enhance their service offerings, such as integrating payment options or referral codes to boost user engagement and ride frequency.
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In no particular order, here are some popular brands that offer resources including built-in feature prioritization techniques and programs:
ProductPlan offers tools like learning centers, glossaries and templates. It equips product managers with the resources they need to make informed prioritization decisions.
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A product management tool that offers feature prioritization capabilities, it helps prioritize features based on various criteria and collaborate with teams to make informed decisions.
An Aha! Features Prioritization page.
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This software helps to prioritize features by providing a scoring system and visualization tools. It lets brands align their product strategy with feature prioritization.
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Jira also offers features for backlog prioritization and feature tracking.
Jira is a popular project management software choice.
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This product management software offers features for prioritization, roadmap planning and collaboration.
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Here are some helpful best practices for teams and product management on how to prioritize features:
It’s crucial to align the entire team under a shared vision for the product. This common understanding ensures that every decision the team makes during the feature prioritization process supports the brand’s overarching goals. It's vital that management and stakeholders communicate this vision clearly and consistently. It will foster a strong sense of purpose across all departments.
Feature prioritization thrives in an environment where leadership is shared and collaborative. It’s important to involve various stakeholders from different departments to gather diverse perspectives. This inclusivity helps to make balanced decisions that consider the multifaceted needs of the business. It enhances the product’s alignment with market demands and internal capabilities.
It’s vital not to base decisions solely on gut reactions, isolated feature ROI (return on investment) or the loudest voice in the room. Instead, teams should prioritize features based on a structured and objective approach to avoid biases that can derail the prioritization process. So, it’s good to consider sales and support requests, for example, but not let them dominate the decision-making process.
Frank Spillers explains important points about ROI, metrics and more in this video:
While data provides critical insights that can guide the prioritization process, it’s better to combine these findings with professional intuition. It can lead to more nuanced decisions. Teams should use metrics and analytics to inform decisions. However, they should also trust the experience and instincts of the team to capture opportunities that data alone might not reveal.
UX Strategist and Consultant, William Hudson explains key aspects about data-driven design:
Feature prioritization should be a collaborative team activity. Teams should limit the number of items under consideration at one time to avoid overwhelm and facilitate easier decision-making. It’s best to categorize initiatives based on their strategic alignment and customer value, to manage and streamline the prioritization process effectively.
Teams should start with clear, strategic goals before they assess individual features. Evaluate the value, urgency and feasibility of each feature. It’s helpful to use scoring models to quantify and compare the potential impact of different features. This will help ensure that teams prioritize the most critical and beneficial enhancements.
In any case, it’s important to consider both the potential impact of new features and the effort these require to implement. This balance helps to make strategic decisions that optimize resource allocation and maximize return on investment.
Before teams dive into prioritization, they should organize features into themes, user story maps or align them with the broader product strategy. This organization helps to visualize how individual features contribute to overall goals. Like product roadmapping, it makes it easier to identify which enhancements will deliver the most value.
Market and customer needs keep evolving. So should the feature list. Teams should make regular time to review and adjust priorities as new information becomes available or as project dynamics change. This agility allows a team to remain relevant and competitive.
It’s essential to embrace an iterative approach in any case. Teams should allow for adjustments as they gather feedback and as project conditions evolve. This flexibility can lead to more innovative and user-focused product enhancements.
Laura Klein explains the iterative nature of teams in Agile design:
It’s vital to put the customer at the center of the prioritization process. Teams should build strong alignment with cross-functional stakeholders to ensure that every feature adds real value to the user experience. This approach not only enhances customer satisfaction. It also attracts potential customers, drives loyalty and business growth.
Some organizations blend different models to refine their prioritization process. For example, a combination of the Kano model and a scoring system can help teams to balance user delight against practical implementation concerns.
Overall, for product management, feature prioritization is a fact of life on the path to brand success. When managers know how best to prioritize features for an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), they can bring a sharper focus to their brand’s vision and gear team efforts around versions of a product or service that will yield better results and delight more customers more consistently.
Take our UX Management: Strategy and Tactics course for important insights into product management techniques and more.
Read our piece, The Kano Model – A tool to prioritize the users’ wants and desires.
See Feature Prioritization Frameworks: Build Only What Matters by Adam Fard for further information.
Go to 5 Prioritization Methods in UX Roadmapping by Sarah Gibbons for more insights.
Consult Feature Prioritization: Methods, Frameworks, and Best Practices by Paula Becchetti for additional information.
Read Best Practices for Better Product Feature Prioritization by Productboard Editorial for further insights.
Learn about an example of feature prioritization in Safeboda Product Prioritization Case Study by Sammy Mati.
Several tools can help you prioritize features effectively in UX design. Trello, for instance, offers a visual organization platform that enables teams to manage projects and prioritize tasks using cards and boards. Jira, another powerful tool, is ideal for agile teams. It allows you to create user stories, plan sprints, and distribute tasks across your software or design team.
For those who prefer to base decisions on user feedback, UserVoice provides a platform where users can vote on features, giving insights into customer priorities. Productboard also stands out by helping designers understand what users need and prioritize features that align with the product's objectives.
Moreover, prioritization frameworks such as the RICE scoring model (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) or the Kano Model can guide decisions about feature implementation. These models help teams assess and rank features based on their potential impact and required effort.
Read our piece, The Kano Model – A tool to prioritize the users’ wants and desires.
Take our UX Management: Strategy and Tactics course for important insights into product management techniques and more.
To involve users in feature prioritization is crucial to create user-centered products that meet actual needs. Here are some best practices you can adopt:
Conduct surveys: Surveys provide a straightforward way to collect feedback from a large group of users quickly. Ask specific questions about potential features to gauge user interest and needs.
Utilize user interviews: One-on-one interviews offer deep insights into user preferences and behaviors. These sessions can uncover detailed feedback on which features users find valuable and why.
Implement usability testing: Testing different versions of a product with users helps identify which features enhance their experience and which might be less important. This method directly influences prioritization based on performance.
Create a user advisory board: To form a group of users who regularly provide feedback on product development can ensure ongoing user engagement and valuable insights into feature importance.
Analyze usage data: Use analytics tools to monitor how users interact with your product. High engagement areas can highlight features that deserve priority.
Take our Master Class How to Get Started with Usability Testing with Cory Lebson, Principal and Owner of Lebsontech LLC.
Watch as UX Strategist and Consultant, William Hudson explains key aspects about data-driven design, including analytics:
Common mistakes in feature prioritization often include the following:
To neglect user feedback and insights can lead to a team prioritizing features that do not address actual user problems or enhance their experience. Designers and product managers must engage with users regularly to gather qualitative and quantitative data that guides the prioritization process.
To ignore market trends and competitor actions can result in missed opportunities or falling behind in innovation. It’s crucial to maintain a balanced view that considers the competitive landscape while staying true to the unique value proposition of the product.
To choose features based on opinions rather than empirical data can lead to biased decisions that don’t necessarily meet the broader user or business goals. To utilize metrics and analytics to drive decisions helps to align features with the product's strategic goals.
To fail to revisit and adjust the feature priorities. It’s essential to check in and make adjustments as projects evolve. What seemed important at the beginning might become less critical as market conditions, technology, and user expectations change.
Take our Master Class How To Design UX That Users Love To Convert Through with Talia Wolf, Founder, GetUplift for important insights into what can delight users.
Watch as UX Strategist and Consultant William Hudson explains how to write good questions to prompt effective feedback:
To prioritize features in new product development, do the following:
1. Gather and analyze user feedback. To understand what users need and value helps you focus on features that will genuinely enhance their experience.
2. Next, assess each feature’s impact on your business goals. Determine how likely each feature is to increase revenue, attract new customers, or improve operational efficiency. Use a scoring system like the Weighted Scoring Model to quantify the importance of each feature based on these criteria. Also, consider the effort each feature requires. Evaluate the resources, time and cost you need to develop each one. Features that offer significant benefits but require less effort might take priority over more complex ones that offer similar value. Market trends and competitor analysis are crucial too. Look at what similar products are doing and identify features that could give your product a competitive edge. However, ensure these features align with your users’ needs and business objectives.
3. Last, involve various stakeholders in the prioritization process. Product managers, developers, and marketers should all have input because they offer different perspectives on what’s essential for the product’s success. By using these steps, you can ensure that you prioritize features effectively, balancing user needs, business goals, and development resources.
User personas help you prioritize features effectively by representing the needs, goals, and behaviors of your target users. Here’s how to use them in feature prioritization:
Create detailed personas: Start by developing detailed user personas based on data from user research. Include demographics, behaviors, needs, and pain points. The more detailed your personas, the better you can understand what features will serve them best.
Map features to personas: For each feature you consider, determine which persona it serves. This helps you focus on developing features that meet the specific needs of your users. Features that address the core needs of your primary personas should take priority.
Assess impact: Evaluate how much each feature will impact the personas. Consider how a feature will solve a problem or enhance the user experience for that persona. Features with a high impact on important personas should rank higher in your prioritization.
Gather feedback: Use prototypes and mockups to test how real users from each persona group react to different features. Feedback can validate your assumptions and help you adjust your priorities to better align with user needs.
When you focus on personas, you ensure that feature development aligns closely with what your users genuinely need and want. This makes your product more user-centered and likely to succeed.
Author and Human-Computer Interaction Expert, Professor Alan Dix explains user personas in this video:
Take our Master Class User Stories Don't Help Users: Introducing Persona Stories with William Hudson, Consultant Editor and Author.
As a product matures, the approach to feature prioritization evolves significantly. Initially, the focus is on building core features that establish the product’s foundation and address the most urgent needs of the users.
Once the basic functionality is in place, the prioritization shifts towards enhancing user experience and adding features that differentiate the product from competitors. At this stage, feedback from early users becomes crucial. Product teams analyze this feedback to identify and prioritize improvements that can increase user satisfaction and engagement.
As the product continues to grow and capture a larger market share, feature prioritization starts to include scalability and integration with other services or products. The emphasis also includes optimizing existing features for better performance and efficiency.
In later stages of a product’s lifecycle, the focus may shift again towards innovation and expansion. New features might explore emerging technologies or expand the product’s capabilities to new user segments. At this mature stage, the prioritization process often involves balancing innovation with maintaining the stability and usability of the existing system.
Throughout all these phases, continuous user feedback, market trends analysis, and strategic business goals drive the evolution of feature prioritization. This ensures that the product remains relevant, competitive, and aligned with user needs and business objectives.
Read our Topic Definition of Product Management to understand more about it.
Take our UX Management: Strategy and Tactics course for important insights into product management techniques and more.
To ensure diversity and inclusion in feature prioritization, you must actively consider the diverse needs of your user base. Here’s a structured approach to achieving this:
Conduct inclusive research: Start by gathering data from a broad and diverse group of users. Include individuals from various backgrounds, abilities, ages, and cultures in your research to understand the spectrum of user needs and experiences.
Develop diverse personas: Create user personas that reflect the diversity of your actual or potential user base. These personas should include underrepresented groups to ensure their needs are not overlooked during the feature prioritization process.
Use inclusive design principles: Apply principles of inclusive design to ensure your product is accessible to everyone. This includes considering features that improve usability for people with disabilities, such as screen reader compatibility, color contrast settings, and easy navigation.
Prioritize features that promote accessibility: Make features that enhance accessibility a high priority. This shows a commitment to inclusivity and can expand your product’s reach and usability.
Regularly seek feedback: Continuously collect feedback from a diverse group of users. This helps in understanding whether your feature prioritization aligns with the needs of all user segments and allows for adjustments based on real-world use.
When you follow these steps, you can ensure your feature prioritization process respects and addresses the diversity of your user base, making your product more inclusive and welcoming to all.
Read our Topic Definition of Inclusive Design to understand more about this important subject.
See why accessibility is always a vital consideration in design:
In agile development, feature prioritization plays a crucial role to help ensure the team efficiently delivers the most valuable product features to users. Here's how it helps:
Focuses the team: To prioritize features helps the development team focus on what matters most. By identifying the most important features first, the team can allocate their resources and efforts to deliver high-impact results quickly.
Speeds up delivery: Agile development thrives on short cycles of delivery, known as sprints. Feature prioritization ensures that during each sprint, the team works on the most crucial features. This leads to faster releases and quicker user feedback.
Improves flexibility: Agile teams need to adapt quickly to changes, such as shifting market demands or user needs. Effective feature prioritization allows teams to adjust their focus swiftly and efficiently, integrating new priorities into upcoming sprints without significant disruptions.
Enhances product value: By focusing on delivering features that provide the most value to users, prioritization ensures that the development effort directly contributes to enhancing user satisfaction and achieving business goals.
Reduces waste: Agile feature prioritization helps in minimizing work on less important tasks. This efficient focus prevents waste of time and resources on features that do not align with current user needs or business objectives.
Overall, feature prioritization is essential in agile development for directing team efforts. When teams know how to prioritize features in agile, it speeds up product delivery, and ensures the development aligns with strategic goals and user expectations.
Watch as UX Designer and Author of Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups, Laura Klein explains important aspects of Agile.
Take our Master Class Design For Agile: Common Mistakes And How To Avoid Them with Laura Klein, Principal – Users Know and Senior Design Educator – IxDF
To handle conflicting priorities among different user groups involves a strategic approach to ensure you address diverse needs without compromising the product's vision. Here’s how you can manage this effectively:
Gather comprehensive feedback: Collect detailed feedback from all user groups to understand their specific needs and priorities. Use surveys, interviews, and usability testing to gather this data.
Identify commonalities and conflicts: Analyze the feedback to spot common needs across different groups and identify where their priorities conflict. Understanding these patterns helps you decide how to balance these needs.
Prioritize based on impact and alignment: Decide which features have the highest impact on user satisfaction and align most closely with your product goals. Prioritize features that benefit multiple user groups or significantly enhance the experience for one group without alienating others.
Create a transparent roadmap: Communicate your decisions and the rationale behind them to all stakeholders. A transparent roadmap helps manage expectations and shows users that their input influences product development.
Iterate based on feedback: After you implement features, continue to collect and analyze user feedback. Use this ongoing input to adjust priorities and address any issues that arise, ensuring that the product evolves in a way that respects the diverse needs of all user groups.
By following these steps, you can manage conflicting priorities effectively, and ensure that the product development process is inclusive and balanced.
Read our Topic Definition of Product Management to understand more about it.
Take our UX Management: Strategy and Tactics course for important insights into product management techniques and more.
Quantitative data plays a crucial role in feature prioritization by providing objective, numerical insights that guide decision-making. Here’s how it helps:
Measures user behavior: Quantitative data tracks how users interact with your product. It shows which features they use most, how often they use them, and which features they ignore. This information helps identify what is important to users.
Supports hypothesis testing: When you propose a new feature, quantitative data allows you to test hypotheses about user needs and preferences. By analyzing data from A/B tests or usage statistics, you can validate or refute your assumptions before committing resources to full-scale development.
Helps prioritize based on impact: Quantitative data can predict the potential impact of a feature on your business goals. Metrics like expected revenue increase, user retention rates, and potential market reach help prioritize features that offer the most significant benefits.
Facilitates objective decision-making: By relying on data, teams can make decisions that are less influenced by personal bias or assumptions. This objectivity ensures that the development focus aligns with what genuinely drives user engagement and business success.
Overall, quantitative data is invaluable in feature prioritization as it provides clear, measurable insights that help align product development with user needs and business objectives.
Watch as William Hudson explains important points about quantitative data in this video:
Fard, A. (2022). Digital Product Feature Prioritization: Conceptual Frameworks.
This publication provides an overview of various conceptual frameworks for prioritizing features in digital product development. It explores methods such as the MoSCoW technique, the Kano model, and the Effort-Impact matrix, discussing how they can be used to evaluate and rank product features based on factors like user value, implementation effort, and strategic alignment. The article emphasizes the importance of feature prioritization in ensuring that product teams focus on building the most impactful features first, given limited resources. It also highlights the need to involve multiple stakeholders and consider both qualitative and quantitative data when prioritizing features. This publication is influential as it offers a comprehensive review of feature prioritization approaches, helping product managers and designers make more informed decisions about which features to include in their roadmaps.
Here’s the entire UX literature on Feature Prioritization by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:
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