Too Many Features? How to Prioritize and Trade off Product Features?

When you develop a product, if you run into the problem of having too few features, you should pause building it cause you haven't thought through.

But like most people, you dream of new killer features day and night and end up with too many of them. Unless you are working on a brand new products, you'd have bugs/enhancements to deal with.

Here's my ordered criteria for feature/bug fixing/enhancements prioritization and trade-off:

• Business/Sales/Marketing
  1. Does it solve customer's problems? Does it address customer's pain points? Stop dreaming of cool features that don't solve actual problems.
  2. Have customers been complaining a lot on the bugs?
  3. Have customers been asking for the enhancements again and again?
  4. Has any existing or potential customer explicitly ask for it? How important is this customer? is any customer willing to fund this feature development? You should feel great when someone is ready to write you a check to develop something!
  5. How high is it on the wishlist of sales/marketing?
  6. Is it a differentiating feature? does it help our product leap-frog the competition? The truth is: differentiate or die!
  7. How much revenue, how much partnership and how many new customers will it potentially bring? How much more existing customers will spend on the product if we put in this feature?
• Engineering
  1. How much time and resource do we need to develop and test it? Can the feature be trimmed down so that it can be developed and tested in time to meet deadline? Can it be broke down into smaller pieces to be delivered over a couple release cycles?
  2. Is the system ready for heavy use of the feature or the influx of new customers/partners? Does the feature expose holes/weaknesses of the systems that we must also address in the same release? How much time and resource do we expect to spend on addressing the holes and weaknesses?
  3. How risky is it to push this feature in as there may be a chance of delaying the release which we promise to customers at a particular time?
• Support
  1. Does it help reduce support cost significantly?
  2. Will this feature cause a influx of support requests? Do we have the resource to support the feature?

Tags: feature proritization product_management