5 Tips to Determine The Next Product Feature

Decide which feature to implement next or first is often a difficult task to various product managers. We asked a few product managers, developers and successful entrepreneurs, and the three common questions they try to answer when deciding are:

1) Which features will make most money?

2) Which features can be built within shortest possible time?

3) Which features are absolutely essential for product/release to enter the market?

And often their approach is to solve the most urgent problem for majority of users, it guarantees that if you misjudge the feature potential it'll end up solving relatively important problems for most of your customers. We would also consider this list when deciding on your next feature for your product:

Tip #1: What will I discover and learn when working on this feature?

You can not expect to grow without creating things that can help you better understand what your users want. When you understand what they want you can use it as basis to figure out on what feature you should be working on for the next release.

Tip #2: Don't worry about what the end result would look like. What is the first release going to do?

Release fast, listen your users and improve. Even if you improve a feature a couple of times and it turns out to fail, you're still going to save time from chasing the "dream concept" which would have led you to a more incorrect path. Fast prototyping can help you reach the innovation you're looking for.

Tip #3: Improve what your users are engaging with most

While working on your product, why would you work on anything else if you are getting a great response from something that is engaging your users. Start tracking how your users are behaving with the changes you release to figure out what feature flow you should be improving.

Tip #4: Don't build new features that need critical mass if you still don't have it

Work on features that will help you reach critical mass. Critical mass type features don't provide immediate value early on. Build things which will engage people better and give immediate value to your product.

Tip #5: Don't work on heavy user features just yet

They are complete waste of your time till you actually have sustainable amount of heavy users. Heavy user features generally only seems to enhance user experience. Focus on features that will hook new users because they are valuable or solve a problem. Time often worth more than anything else, spend it wisely.