5 things to do when you have too many feature requests and you can’t decide

We live in a world with a paradox of choices and concluding a decision quickly is hard. The problems that we face when we have enormous choices are, being stuck in the decision-making phase for a long time, procrastination, doubting about the decision taken even after started working on it, fearing failure and not finishing what you start.

Though feedbacks and feature requests are boon as it gives valuable insights, having too many can be a bane. Here are five easy steps you can follow to choose the right decision, stride and be successful.

1. First, start working instead of wasting time by thinking:

Before working on a feature request, do proper research and analysis of it. But make sure that you don’t waste much time on research, as a result, there will be only ideas and not the finished products. As you have an ocean of information available on the internet and other sources, coming to a conclusion may take days or maybe even months.

There is a law called “Parkinson law” which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. This is what happens when you don’t set time limits for any work. The time for the work keeps expanding until you don’t fix a deadline.

To optimize the time for decision making, Set time limits and see that the teams make full use of the time, discuss collaboratively and make a clear decision. Once you finalize a decision, don’t doubt about it. Go full on. Start working with full determination and positivity. So when you have a successful start and consistency, you can easily complete the task.

2. Organize and Prioritize:

The biggest challenge of constructing feature requests is prioritization. Once the time, energy and money are invested for developing a feature, it cannot be regained and there are chances it can be a failure if prioritization is not done effectively. Like doing poor market research and improper analysis of customer needs. So, it is important to be cautious while prioritizing the development of features.

First, organize the collection of feedback and feature requests you received using effective feedback tools. You can use upvote feature to know the priority of highest demand. After knowing it, do proper market research, analyze the technologies in trend, find which feature is required urgently and importantly, find which problem or pain point is widely faced by customers, estimate the resources and time required to finish building the feature request.

Sometimes you will get a gut feeling to do start working on a particular idea first, you will feel that it will definitely work out, follow it. Based on all these, start prioritizing the feature requests. List the order of feature requests you are going to work, create deadlines for each feature request and strictly stick to it.

3. Start construction:

“The road to success is always under construction ”

-Lily Tomlin

Once you are done with prioritization, start constructing the product roadmap. Product roadmap should be empowered by business intelligence and competitor intelligence. Business intelligence will help you stay and stride in the right direction as it gives information about customers buying trends and helps you check whether the decision is correct.

Competitor intelligence helps you know how to build unique products with best customer experience ahead of your competitors.

One more thing to be kept in mind while building product roadmap is the customer experience and lifetime value. As 90% of customer experience, decision-makers say that a good experience is critical to have a successful business.

After building the roadmap, don’t forget to share it with your customers. When you share your roadmap with your customers, it shows the transparency and priority you are willing to share with your customers and they tend to engage with your products more and support the product’s growth in the right direction.

4. Don’t hesitate to quit if it’s not working:

“If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
–Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors

Though the planning might be correct, sometimes ideas won’t work out. It is merely a waste of time, energy and money if you keep working on features which are not going to be fruitful. It is better to quit and starting working on the next features. This may occur due to the unexpected changes in the marketing trend and changing user demands. 61% of companies are facing the problem of adapting to changing markets.

Though quitting a process after all the effort that has been made is difficult but cutting down the loses is more important. Because prolonging a process for a long period knowing there are fewer chances for success won’t let you grow instead you will be stuck wasting all the resources which can be diverted to a new path of success.

5. Make your first few customers your partners and evaluate their experience:

“Make the customer the hero of your story.”

– Ann Handley

Your first few customers are your early adopters whose valuable insights can change the direction your product will be taking in future. It becomes important to understand their needs and the reason behind them so that you can evaluate your product’s performance and their experience before selling it to the wide market whose needs might be similar to your early customers.

There are only four rules for sharing a great business relationship with your customers, Communicate well, exceed their expectations, ask for feedback, value them and show your appreciation for their involvement. 51% of US consumers remain loyal to brands because of the interaction with the companies through preferred channels of communication

This way you create a powerful bond with your customers, increase transparency, loyalty and lifetime value. You can rectify and improvise your product according to their feedback to obtain greater success.

These five steps go in a loop and eventually you will learn to take the most effective decisions. Effective decisions reduce the risk factors thereby increasing profitability. So once the right decision is taken, you can easily stride and win.

We at @hellonext encourages every product company to understand the importance of feedback. We help a lot of companies to unify the feedback process and help them to validate them in one organized place. Follow us at twitter @hellonexthq to get real-time updates on our amazing journey in touching many lives.