How to Prioritize Your Product’s Features

decisions

You’ve built the first version of your product, or perhaps an early prototype. You’ve shown it to your prospects. You’re confident you know the product you need to go build.

How do you decide what parts to build first? To answer this question, you need to take a hard look at the features and ask…

What Can’t We Live Without?

Every product has 1-2 early features that define the core value proposition. Maybe it’s the ability to take and upload photos (like Instagram) or perhaps list and ship something from your closet to someone else (like Poshmark). These features are almost always the hardest technical problems to solve.

You should always start here, because if you don’t get this part right, nothing else will matter. In the case of Instagram, they focused maniacally in the early days on two things: Making file uploads APPEAR faster and making it easy to create amazing pictures with filters. It’s how they won the photo sharing war.

In our example with Poshmark, if it’s a huge pain for a user list their item and then put it in a box and get it out of their house, they’re not going to bother. Game over.

What’s the Risk?

Let’s say you kick those really difficult problems to the end of the project. You focus on a great user experience, nice designs, etc like all of the books tell you to do. All of that is important, but if you leave the most important problems to last, you inevitably run into obstacles you had no idea were there.

There’s ALWAYS more pressure at the end of a build cycle to get the product out the door. You end up cutting corners and releasing half-baked solutions.

Tackling these issues earlier in the build process allows you to adjust less important features off of the release to hit your dates, rather than having a really pretty app that doesn’t deliver value.

Just Remember

  • Identify the 1-2 features of your product that must work flawlessly to deliver your promise
  • Tackle the hardest technical problems in those features first to uncover any blocking issues
  • Give yourself space and permission to move less important features off of the product

Your Assignment

Have you chickened out / punted the hard parts of your product to the end of the calendar? Ask your developers what’s got them worried about the remaining build of your product and figure out a way to move those items up the build calendar.