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Product Nerds: How do you decide if it's worth it to build a feature? 🤔
This question was recently asked on a Twitter Community I'm part of and it made me think a lot!
This is what we do @SigmaOS:
1. Check if feature is aligned with product ethos (we're quite strict there)
2. Talk to users to understand how important the feature is for them to achieve their objective on the app
3. Run experiments to see if it improves our key metrics
Would love to know what you all do? 😁
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DJJD
I dogfood/use my own SaaS product daily (like a real customer) because that's the only real way to understand it completely and figure out what works well and what still needs improvement (it never ends!) It also happens to solve a very important problem for many.
Finally it's also important to stay ahead of the curve in my niche (so I can keep it up to date).
I do take feedback from our users as well.
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We first try to imagine how the feature could work for us. Then we try to expand everything and build some user cases on how it would increase the value of our product. Finally, we would ask community what they think. It's also useful to check out the reviews people are writing to see what features they would like to get and do research on similar products in the market.
Btw, we’re launching in late May. Check out our upcoming PH page: www.producthunt.com/upcoming/eff...
Our project is called: Effecto. It’s an app for detailed habits, health, symptoms, and meds tracking. Pretty much for everything that is related to your physical or mental health and every daily factor that can affect you.
I think these three steps are really good. Another thing to think about is how this new feature will enable growth. If it hits all of the three above points, you should also ask how it will reach beyond existing users and catalyze growth for your business.
To calculate the importance, I rate each feature (0–5) against KPIs: Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, Referral, etc. Each KPI also has an impact coefficient based on your company’s current goal. If the goal changes, the impact coefficient of each KPI should be re-evaluated. For example if you look at the attached image, the goal of this company was to increase customer retention, hence retention has the highest coefficient of 0.4. To calculate the impact, I multiply each score by a KPI’s coefficient, add them and divide them by the total KPI’s. At the same time, I measure the implementation effort for each feature (dev effort, marketing, technical support, etc.) Once you have the impact and effort, you can score each feature based on impact vs effort. Hope this helps.
QuickPayPortal
Sometimes simple idea validation content funnel is enough, you run the idea by your audience in social media/blog/newsletter and see how they respond. However, if the feature requires significant resource input to make it work, more detailed market research might be a good idea. In that case, we at Approveit do pretty much the same thing you described and add competition research; see if anyone else in our niche has this feature already and how it works for them
I use my platform built for feature prioritization where I collect feedback, separate them into desired outcome buckets, then Run Ad-Hoc research studies (Customer Interviews, Surveys, etc), Prototype/brainstorm ideas, (Moderated/Unmoderated) usability test them and finally use the finds to create/implement/release the feature