Bug or Feature : What Matters Most?

Justin Thomas
Jul 20, 2017 · 4 min read

How to Choose Your Priorities

How do you decide on what bug or feature to prioritize in your next product cycle? This is a big question that teams stumble over.

These decisions are influenced by customer feedback, market research, or innovating technology. A lot of thought goes into deciding what features to prioritize.

But the real struggle is how to prioritize your list.

Very natural as someone from the client facing team to blame some product limitations causing client connects on the product developers. However, they can’t do much as they are already working a new product or a new feature and focussing any part of their time on the problem would mean there is standoff off between bug vs feature.

Process to drive prioritization?

The most important question every business has to answer before making the decision is the impact on monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

What is the ROI on the effort they are putting in for something where they could have invested somewhere else?

Read more on opportunity cost here

In any business involved in bug fixing or feature rollouts, there are three general stakeholders — clients, developers, and teams speaking that interact with clients directly (customer support, account manager etc.)

The chain looks something like this:

Customer complains to the support team who pass it onto the developers.But not all customer complaints are to be treated equal and need to be funneled in a systematic way such that we can determine their value.

The support team should have a clear picture of how issues are going to be taken up. They act as an intermediary liaising with both parties — the customer and the developers.

They need to make a list of the impact that each customer request has on the workflow. If you give each request a number on a scale of 1–10, this will help you answer and frame your case to vouch for your customer’s request.

This will also help you combat any bias that gets created when prioritizing bugs.

‘Quick Wins’ are the issues that can help you win customers, ideally would be termed as easy wins for both sides

‘Major Projects’ are the one’s that you need to do put all your effort and don’t deviate from this

‘Fill Ins’ are the ones that can be taken up at a later stage and has very or little impact. We also can reconsider them if at all they are necessary

‘Thankless Tasks’ are the ones that just don’t have any value attached to it, not worth the effort. Such tasks need to be dropped given that they have little business sense.

Here are the kind of metrics you can look to use. Go through this feature prioritization matrix and assign a number to the feature or bug that's under investigation

  • Client Priority: 1–10
  • Is this a paying customer? (No=1, Yes =2)
  • Impact to customer (1= low, 2= no significant impact to their customers, 3= impacts them and their customers)
  • Number of customers affected (1= low, 2= several, 3= most)

Bug / Feature Priority = [impact*number of paying customers*paying customer]

Using this criteria helps you filter out feature requests. And then you can move onto identifying the bigger impact to help with feature prioritization

  • Why a bug should be prioritized?
  • How much revenue is at stake?

Should your gut feeling lead feature decisions?

There’s one question that is difficult to answer: How do you argue for a feature or fix that is tricky to map back to MRR, even if your your gut is telling you it will be valuable for customers?

Shouldn’t happen, but as an edge case — if it then try,

  1. Find if an alternative can help fix the issue
  2. If there’s no workaround, make a business case for the fix.

As somebody working closely with clients, you can or should take a call on which metrics should be considered before you start identifying the underlying tone of dissatisfaction. You understand that the customer is losing productivity and workflow because of this bug. At this point MRR goes out of the window.

This is the time to use your veto power as a client facing team, but remember to use this power at the right place and time.

While prioritizing avoid

Sales or Support is cribbing
Gut feeling
Senior Management sent a note

Summary

Since resources are a limited, we should focus on the features / bug with the biggest opportunity score. This algorithm won’t prevent you from failing or working on the “wrong” bug/features, but it will give you a clear outline on what’s important and what’s not.

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Justin Thomas

Written by

Internet Buff | Technology Freak | Wants to make a difference

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