Why you should prioritize features?

Just to keep the sanity of your product!

Everyday you would receive numerous product ideas from your peers, customers, competitors, industry, sales, marketing, channel partners, resellers, distributors and literally everyone around you. Every such request puts a Product Manager in a spot. Saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to such features would have long term implications on the product and the organization as such. But such a challenge is less acknowledged by your tribe and you would constantly be pushed to make decisions against your will and vision.

Once a colleague of mine from a different team asked me, “Why don’t you guys try to accommodate all feature requests that come from key customers?. They are ready to pay for all the design and development effort that you put in. You just need to make sure the features are delivered on time and to their expectation. That way it is easy to sell and we have enough work on hand for which someone is ready to pay. ”

That’s a simple solution. Isn’t it?

I replied him, “Sure. With such a simple solution you will also eliminate a department of Product Managers and there by your development costs would come down too and your margin will just shoot up.” He went mum. I guessed he probably started to think why Product Managers even exist in this world, let aside our presence in the company.

Yes, as a matter of fact I would not want to build features even if someone is willing to pay for it.

But why?

1. Because then my product would not stand for its cause.
2. Because that would just bloat my product to the extent you would even struggle to perform the most obvious function expected out of my product.
3. Because my customers would not have one reason to remember my product and my product does everything in this world with mediocrity.
4. Because I would not be solving the problem that most of my target customers have, but solve the problem of one customer who paid for a couple of licenses.
5. Because my development team would be working on something that would create less impact and that’s an opportunity cost for me.
6. Because I am long term focused and do not care about the short term glory.
7. Because I believe in the vision I have for my product.

So, how to decide on the priority of product features?

I have tried to provide a holistic answer to this question in a different post here.

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