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!  

Design responsively for the future... or risk fading away

Every time a new technology device comes out with web-browsing capability, clients will ask question, “Will my website work?” If the answer is unclear, or no, designers then have to go back and create a new product… or maybe they don’t. 

Source: Laura Mihelich

Screen size difference between mobile devices and traditional laptop
computers creates a need for responsive design. 

As a graduate student on the Interactive Publishing track at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, I have spent the last several quarters learning about the implications of web technologies. Each time responsive design comes up, it is met with resounding positivity because it means that websites can be viewed on all screen sizes and platforms.

Over half of adult cell phone owners in the U.S. use their mobile device to go online, according to recent Pew research. This is why clients are concerned. With more people connecting online via mobile, businesses could be affected if they are unreachable via cell phone browsers. This trend is not only U.S. based. According to a recent article in the Australia Business Review, 94 percent of surveyed Australians have researched a product or service on their cell phone, however 79 percent of Australians businesses do not have a mobile-friendly website.

“Statistics show that businesses are playing catch-up with the consumer, who uses an iPad or mobile phone as a laptop replacement,” the article said, which is why designers need to know responsive design in order to keep up with clients, users, and technology.

Several media outlets have already made the switch or are planning to move to responsive design. The Boston Globe seems to be the leading example of a 100 percent responsive website, which adapts to both screen size and touch based on the device. ReadWriteWeb, a leading web technology blog, also recently announced they were planning on replacing their native app with a responsive website, according to an article in the Neiman Journalism Lab.  By thinking about responsive design, ReadWriteWeb actually found that this change makes more sense for their audience, as the blog’s readers tend to look through the site on a Safari browser rather than the iPhone app.

Through my experience and research at Northwestern, I believe that when thinking about moving your clients to responsive design websites, there are a few things you should consider first:

1. Learn - As a designer, there isn’t much you can do until you’ve learned the capabilities of responsive design. 
2. Experiment - One of the best ways to learn is to experiment with liquid layouts. There are several framework systems that can be used to create responsive sites such as Foundation and Twitter Bootstrap. If you are using a content management system, such as Wordpress, there are plenty of customizable, responsive themes to choose from on sites such as ThemeForest.
3. Research - Before you can create your responsive website, you have to know the audience you are building for. This audience will change depending on the client.  As with ReadWriteWeb, clients may find out more about their audience through this process, which will help you when developing the tone of the new site. Here are some example questions:
• “How many people find the website via mobile?”
• “What behaviors do viewers need to perform on the website?”
4. Design - When designing a responsive website, there are several thing you need to think about:
• Using HTML correctly - With responsive design you want to make sure that the most pressing information appears on top of the page on every platform, so make sure to structure HTML to reflect this layout.
• Keep it simple -  You don’t want to overwhelm the users with too many items on the page or a wall of text. Therefore, again, keep it organized and to the point. 
• Optimize your photos for web browsing - Reduce your graphic/image resolution. Large, high-resolution images will slow down smartphone browsing, and users will not wait around if you site is not easily accessible.

Don’t get stuck in a design rut. It’s easy to continue to do things the same way. However, because technology is always changing, designers need to as well. Have fun and experiment. You never know what you will come up when using the browser as your viewing platform.

Laura Mihelich is a graduate student at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, focusing on interactive publishing.  She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa in Journalism and Psychology.  Laura loves design, web coding, and cooking, and can almost always be found on Twitter keeping up with the latest technology news and finding design inspiration. Twitter | LinkedIn