New Approach to Product Development

I was asking a similar question about a few months ago, and all the advice was the generic 'speak to users', which doesn't really help with prioritizing your features.

What I decided was to go into a meeting and ask 5 questions.

1) Are we living up to our promise?

2) Is anything preventing us from being able to demo our product effectively and allow a potential customer to imagiine themselves using the product?

3) Is anything preventing us from completing a sale?

4) What are our upcoming milestones and what do we need to develop to reach these goals?

5) Anything else we'd like to have and might have time to add.

The promises bit is about living up to our values, if we say we have a secure system that does xyz, and it doesn't do that (which it wasn't), fixing that is our priority.

Then we a priming the sales funnel, is our demo effective and can people actually buy. This also captures feature requests from customers who say "I won't buy until you have feature x", and when somebody is in a demo and they expected one experience and got another, if that broke their movement through to sales, we capture that here.

Company milestones is interesting because it captures things that are often not considered part of product. If the goal is to have 1000 new sign-ups, that may be mostly a marketing function, but what can engineering do to facilitate that? When the goal is fundraising, and we wanted to have a special feature that would really work well for investors, that is captured in product development planning, rather than coming out of left field at the last minute.

The last item is the one where we get to be a bit creative, and we often don't end up getting to this question because we've got a full plate from the other development tasks that have been prioritized before we get to this point. Otherwise, this is where we get to add in some features that we think might be interesting, but are not a priority in growing the business.

This isn't the perfect methodology, and it is still a work in progress, but I find it has helped us stay focused on priorities when discussions get on about features and we can ask, what bucket does it fit into.