Product Managers: 3 Key Concepts to Keep in Mind While Prioritising Your Feature Backlog

Regardless of whether you're a junior, mid-level, or senior executive Product Manager, prioritising your feature backlog will play a significant role in how you perform. Prioritising features will give you clarity on how your product will look as time passes, as well as ensures that what you produce will be of the highest quality it can be. Fortunately or unfortunately however, prioritisation can be done in a multitude of ways, and there isn't a "one size fits all" solution. It's great practice to evaluate a number of techniques, and choose what works for you, your company, and your product.

Tomer London, the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gusto gives us a framework to do just that in his article Comparing Apples and Oranges: A New Prioritization Framework for Product Managers. The cloud-based payroll and HR company knows what it takes to get a high-quality product out the door, and place a large amount of importance in how they prioritize. London talks about how it's often easy to compare features that are similar in nature to one another -- apples to apples -- but more notably, gives us a framework to compare features greatly differing in characteristics -- what he calls apples to oranges. Using frameworks like the impact matrix, he shows us how we can make better informed decisions for our users.

Image from Chron

Jeff Betts, former Product Manager at Google, also endorses using frameworks in feature prioritisation, and places a large amount of importance on measuring impact. He talks about giving users the chance to voice how much of an impact a feature would make, and mentions how building that - as well as potential costs -- in as factors in the framework you use is key. Betts also talks about OKRs -- objectives and key results -- and stresses the point that as Product Managers, it's important to define what success means early on, and measure your product against it as your project gathers steam. The factors you include in your framework will play a defining role in what your product will look like.

Based on these articles, it's clear that there are a few actions you should adopt:

1. Use the matrix: Gusto’s customer impact vs. expectations matrix is a great tool to judge your next feature against, as is Jeff Bett's cost vs impact framework. Think about what structures help you in evaluating your feature or product -- it could be the difference between a successful offering and a confused one.

2. Think numbers: Numbers give you an objective measure of success. Wherever possible, quantifying measures important to your product will give you a greater sense of clarity.

3. Visualize success: Think of what your successful product looks like, and make sure your team does as well. One key responsibility of a Product Manager is to maintain the vision of a product, and motivate his team members to uphold it.

The next time you're confused about what features to throw into your product mix, think frameworks and metrics, as well as what your ideal product looks like.

Author: Tav Agarwal is a senior at Northwestern University studying Economics, Computer Science, and Marketing. Tav is passionate about how technology can have a positive impact on society, and spends his time looking up cool new products. Follow Tav on Twitter, or connect with him on Linkedin to learn more!  

Tech Startup CEO/CMOs: Three pitfalls you should watch out when launching your product

As an executive at a start-up, you know that it is often tricky to introduce a new technology into the marketplace. 

As a masters candidate of IMC(Integrated Marketing Communication) in Medill School, Northwestern University, I have identified two articles that can help you bypass the pitfalls with ease and grace. 

In the first article Failure Is the Best Thing That Could Happen to Google Glass, The author Marcus Wohlsen points out the first blunder Google Glass committed is to target the wrong group, the lack of insightful user cases is to blame.  The author believes that google was crippled by an typical engineer kind of pitfall: Overconfident in “the sheer force of its(the products’) awesomeness” to loosen the purse string of the customers while overlooking user case and customer insight analysis. Google Glass may have been better suited in specific industry context, But Google played the wrong card —they put too much effort in creating the hype in the B2C section.

                                                             (Resource: The Forbes )

While Google Glass represents the most recent hallmark failure in the domain of disruptive technology, Google+ is another lesson Google present to tech marketers in the red ocean. Danny Crichton, a former employee at Google, has spoken out his thoughts over Google’s notorious failure in entering the social landscape. Danny acclaimed “focus is absolutely everything” in his A Personal Reflection On Google+, contending the lost of focus is fatal to Google+. In his perspective, the big internal chasm between engineer culture “where data and algorithm reign supreme” and the demand of everyday users also takes its toll in pushing Google+ one inch closer to the brink of failure.

After reviewing these articles, and based on my experience through the graduate program at Northwestern Medill IMC, here are three action which you should think about to shunt away botched product launch:

• Connect your customers - It’s not only about making awesome product, but also making it applicable to your customers in their day-to-day use cases.
• Gap the internal chasm. it’s paramount for tech start-up to build an effective way of communication between its key engineering people and marketing/business crew.
• Keep your goal simple.  Don’t try to overcomplicate your product -it will only confuse the customers and scare them away.

Rina(Xiaoru) Lin is a full-time IMC student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. I'm passionated about “connecting the dots”, combining the data and consumer insight and turn them into actionable strategy. I'm interested in tech market because I believe the power of technology makes the world a lot better, and I want to be part of it. 

@ her at twitter! @RinaXiaoruLin