Comments on: How do you decide what features to build (or kill)?

By: James McBryan

James McBryan — Sun, 26 Mar 2017 02:31:15 +0000

Customer Driven Development is definitely key, unfortunately it took me a few years to do correctly. Going a little bit deeper, these are some key best practices that I do when doing customer driven development:

1) I never build any big feature if I don’t have 10 champions that I can bounce wireframes and ideas off of

2) I always validate a feature with wireframes before actually doing the development. It’s easier to iterate when things have not been built

3) I ask a very serious question: will this help me get more customers or retain existing customers. I usually stack this up with 5 to 10 other features so it lets me prioritize on the right one

4) If it’s a small feature that takes developers < 1 hour, we usually just build it. Customers love love love when you polish out the product for them. They know it's easy, and if they are that eager for it, 1 hour of your time will save hours of their time and build you loyal customer.

By: NaKeisha Barry

NaKeisha Barry — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 23:48:58 +0000

Does your product development team include your support team (those answering calls, tickets, etc.)? In my experience, those with daily interactions with clients bring great perspective. With background knowledge of how features are currently being used, they can add input for improvements or just offer suggestions so that features have the flexibility that clients need. I also think it is a great way to encourage ownership over client interactions as it is leading towards support members making an impact on the product.

By: Tarcisio Pedrotti

Tarcisio Pedrotti — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 18:24:58 +0000

I found the Kano method very intriguing for helping us decide what to implement next – read https://foldingburritos.com/kano-model/ – we will try it next

By: Bounce Plan

Bounce Plan — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 16:49:59 +0000

Great topic! I’m in the process of doing a remodel of my web app and it’s a constant struggle to avoid adding features just because they sound good. For example, there were features for recurring expenses and website links. I decided to remove these features because they have nothing to do with creating a travel plan with a definitive start and end. Every time I think of a feature to add I ask myself if that new feature will turn the app into something else or something it’s not. Or in other words, I ask myself “What is my app?” and then ask “If I add this, will it change that definition?”, Cheers!

By: Jackie Newman

Jackie Newman — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 16:41:57 +0000

Great article Alex! We receive an enormous amount of feature requests and have been struggling to track them in our support platform (it doesn’t have a dedicated feature for this so we have been using a work around). I’m intrigued by tracking them via tags. If you don’t mind, could you share how you go about this?