Developing a list of features for current and future versions of the product - Part 11

This is a series of posts that talk about the features that make up an application, and more importantly, the series of steps through which the list of features for the application are collected. There are a number of sources from which these list of sources are collected (in fact, it is important not to miss as many possible feasible sources as required). Once the list is collected, they need to be added to any sort of tool where the list can be consolidated, details added where required, and then the Product Manager can start ordering the list of features based on some specific criteria. In the last post (Developing a list of features for current and future versions of the product - Part 10), I talked about one way in which the features can be selected for the next version of the product, based on the product going in for a specific area of focus. So, there was a product that had social networking as the theme for the next version of the product, and as a result, those features were ordered higher in the list that had social networking as the theme.
This post will cover more such basis on which features can be prioritized and ordered for the next and future versions of the application. Another way in which features are ordered is by trying to group them into major and minor features. Typically, one of the major necessities of new feature development is to decide on a set of features that look cool, specifically those that look good at reviews. Now, these can be features that add on a major new set of functionality, or do something that can excite users. For example, if you have an application that provides remote control capability on a tablet, a cool new use could be to also to act as a controller for game devices such as the PS3 or the Xbox (now, this is just an example).
In the whole list of features that are available in the database, there will be many such features that are worthy of review and can excite user attention. A wise product manager would not like to add too many features in one go, but add a couple of such features for the next release, then save some for the next version, and so on. Adding too many in one release diminishes the focus on each of them, and also sets expectations for future releases that may be difficult to fulfill. Another important part of such a planning is about the resources for each such feature, and combined, the total resources required for developing and testing such features. Unless the resourcing for the application changes significantly from release to release, the amount of resources available per release will be around the same, and this also limits the amount of work that can be done for each release. In our experience, we always had time only for some new features, and some smaller features / modifications.
Doing some smaller features is important, since many of these are actually refinements of existing features and allows you to pass the message to your customers that existing features are also tweaked based on their inputs (and in fact, in many cases, you should be able to trace a direct path between customer feedback and the changes made in those features based on these feedback). Prioritizing some of these modifications should be done based on the critical nature of the feedback and the urgency of them. In many cases, these modifications are important for customer workflows, and this helps the Product Manager in doing the required prioritization.

Read more about how to do this prioritization in the next post (Developing a list of features for current and future versions of the product - Part 12 - TBD).

Developing a list of features for current and future versions of the product - Part 10

This is a series of posts on how to define a list of features that will be used for current and future versions of an application. If an application needs to be successful, it is important that the application have a great list of features that attracts reviews as well as users. For this purpose, it is important to draw upon a significant list of people and users who can generate a list of features based on their usage of the product, and then it is upto the team, primarily the product manager, to organize these features into a list that will be defined by the priority of the features and the way that these features are managed in terms of which feature will make it into the current version of the product, and which feature will be added to future versions of the product. In the previous post (Developing a list of features for current and future versions of the product - Part 9) I talked about how a tool was used to capture these features, and how the Product Manager would be able to use the tool to review the features and decide the level of detail that is required for each of these features.
In this post, I will talk about how the Product Manager will try and group these features together into a logical set based on the overall feature set planned for the product. This is much easier to do when it is decided to have the next version of the application feature a specific area. So, let us consider the case of a software that generates greeting cards, after giving the user a chance to upload specific image clips, or use stock photography that is made available by the application, allows the user to add details in terms of messaging as well as using pre-determined messages and various other features. The software would let users do all this and then enter email id and name of the person to whom they would send out the email to. Now, the makers of the software felt that their competitors as well as the market were getting focused on using social networking for sending these cards as well. So, once the user has made a card, it was not required to send the card only in a 1:1 situation (which is what email would typically do), but the software would allow the user to post the card on the Facebook profile of the person to whom the card was intended for more people to see; similarly, the card could be posted on Pinterest, or sent via Twitter, and so on. All of these are new age social networking features that were missing in the application.
So, now the overall thrust area of the release was there (there would always be some minor areas that were also present, but these were the broad areas that the product would focus on). For this purpose, the Product Manager would review all the features in the tool that are focused on social networking, get an initial list, and then do a quick prioritization of the features that seem the most important. This would be an initial prioritization, and in most cases, this initial list would be presented to senior management of the team for a review as well, and changes made if required after discussion. Thus, the final selected features from the list would be taken up, with a mix of major and minor features being there in the list (with the ones that are not selected having a note added about why these features were not selected, and some of them might get the tag about being rejected as well). Once this final selected list is available, the team can then use this list for further detailing.