How to decide on what feature to build next for your product?

I have worked on creating and deploying digital products for as long as I can remember. Be it for a customer or for my company, there is one common question that comes up when the product starts to take off:

What feature should we focus on next?

While the answer to this question can be arrived at easily, there is nothing that backs up your answer other than your own gut feeling or a couple of emails from your customers.

As Josh from Baremetrics mentions, founders are bustling with ideas that they cannot stop implementing on their product. But unfortunately, many of these ideas end up doing one of these things:

1. The new feature tanks; no one uses it;
2. Founder ends up wasting time & money working on it;
3. Founder spends time rolling back the feature that they introduced recently;
4. User starts accepting the feature and it works;

The chances of a new feature working out for a user is thin in the first try. Instead, the customers of your products are waiting for you to listen to them, and build what they might want to use;

So how do we solve this problem?

Solving the puzzle to the question “What should I build next?” is not as difficult as you might think. There’s one simple trick to solving this issue, which is to allow your customers to let you know what they are expecting from the product;

One of the best way to learn from your customers is to form a small community (focus group) for your product that will help them keep coming up with things that they might use.

Allowing your customers to vote on features that many other customers are wanting clearly shows you where the demand is.

Having said this, a method like this would certainly help you with three things:

1. Make data-driven decisions;
2. Consistently interact with your customers;
3. Keep your customers in loop;

The current feedback system that most of the companies follow are away from optimised. Our goal at hellonext is to help our customers gather customer feedback in one of the most simplest way possible;

If you believe you want to make data-driven product decisions from the people who would pay for it, try out hellonext.

The platform is extremely elegant and simple to use, for both your people and your customers;