How to Prioritize Features “The Bachelor” style 🌹

In the popular reality series The Bachelor, the eligible bachelor decides each episode which contestants will stay for the next round and who will be rejected. (The women who advance to the next stage get a rose🌹) In the end, after several rounds of elimination, one final woman remains, to whom the bachelor will propose. Feature prioritization (the first step in SaaS Feature Marketing Strategy) works similarly. The first round – selecting the features to enter the contest; the second round – choosing a Feature prioritization model; and the last step is the final rose (finding the perfect Feature or Features😉).

As far as I know, during the Choosing a Feature prioritization model step, the features have not been forced to go on a date in a hot air balloon or go for a night swim.

What happens when Adele is one of the Bachelor’s contestants

What is Feature Marketing?

Feature marketing is a Software/SaaS product marketing strategy that focuses on updating existing features or adding new features to an existing product as part of a company’s efforts to retain customers or attract new customers.

How do we manage SaaS Feature Marketing strategy properly?

Deciding – Feature Prioritization.

Developing

Announcing – For a post on SaaS Feature Marketing strategy , click here

Deciding – SaaS Feature Prioritization

How to Prioritize Features in 3 Steps

• Selecting the features to enter the contest.
• Choosing a Feature prioritization model.
• The Final Rose.

First Step: Selecting the features to enter the contest

Gather all ideas/proposals for feature development from customers, different departments in the company, and surveys.

Suggestions for upgrading features or adding new features from customers: Heavy users (hopefully paying customers) are those who have developed a high level of expertise in using our product. One way to leverage this expertise and encourage customer engagement is by using a tool that includes collecting feature proposals, feedback, and a voting pool designed for B2B companies. Check out Canny’s Customer Feedback Management Tool – Click here.

Suggestions for upgrading features or adding new features from different departments in the company: Usually, the HR department has no interest in feature prioritization, but the development, sales, and marketing departments do. Suggestions that can come from various departments include upgrading existing features, features that competitors have, features that arose in conversations with sales representatives, features discussed on social media, features that only geniuses can think of, and more.

Surveys for potential customers: Send surveys to customers of competitors and prospects. Centiment has a database of thousands of experts in various fields who answer surveys—another way to get new feature ideas from people that match our potential customer profile.

Well, have you already got a stack of feature suggestions?

Second Step: Choosing a Feature Prioritization Model

Sometimes we need a little push to make the right decision. Most SaaS companies will choose not to use a specific prioritization model and hope for the best instead. For those who prefer to invest a little more time in feature prioritization, knowing that incorrect prioritization can end the business, yes, this also happens. Here are the two most popular feature prioritization models: the RICE Scoring Model and Impact-Effort Model.

The RICE Scoring Model for Feature Prioritization

What is the Rice Scoring Model?

RICE framework is a model used by managers to prioritize a variety of areas such as projects, products, tasks, initiatives, and, of course, features. It was invented by Interom, which, thanks to its genius ability for self-marketing, managed to penetrate the model into every possible startup discourse. The model is built from four components:

1. Reach: The number of users (customers) or transactions that will be Impacted by the new feature in a given period (month, quarter, year).
2. Impact: Quantify the impact of the new feature according to a rating scale from 0.25 to 3, where 3 has a massive impact. For example, if we want to add an extra payment option. Will it significantly affect the conversion rate? Can you rate the impact from 0.25 to 3?
3. Confidence: Tricky. How confident are you in the numbers you entered in the Reach and Impact components? This number is in percentages, between 0% and 100%. Do you have additional information, such as surveys, feedback, and open tickets, to back up the answer?
4. Effort: How much time will the development of the feature require from the teams? For example, if we need one person per month for design and one person per month for development. So the number is 2 people/month. In other words, if you estimate a feature development will take a total of 2 people-months, your effort score will be 2

Now all the features are nicely arranged, and you can see that features that are difficult to quantify or that we are less sure of their impact are quickly rejected, and features with a high RICE score are given priority.

Is it scientific – no! Does it help with decision-making – yes. For the full method, click here

The RICE Model for Feature Prioritization using airfocus

For those interested in using the RICE scoring model for feature prioritization, airfocus, a German SaaS company, offers a product management and project management platform that includes templates for feature prioritization, one of which is the RICE model.

Key Features:

• 14-day free trial!
• User-friendly Interface.
• Collect information and feedback from chats, emails, and support in one place.
• User feedback analysis.
• Creating and Sharing roadmaps and views.
• Ready-made templates for Prioritization, Roadmap and Product management.
• Internal and external portal.
• Integration with Online tools such as Slack, Trello, Asana, Zapier.
• Price starts at $69 month.

The Impact-Effort Model for Feature Prioritization

What is the Impact-Effort Model?

The Impact-Effort model (also called Value-Effort) is a simple model for managing and prioritizing projects and features that startups love. It’s a 2×2 grid. Each square represents a level of effort versus a level of impact. For example, the first projects/features we will focus on will be on the upper-left side of the graph ️Quick Wins. Because their level of potential impact is high and the necessary level of effort is low.

The Impact-Effort Model for Feature Prioritization using craft.io

For those interested in using the Impact-Effort model for feature prioritization, craft.io, an Israeli SaaS company, offers a product management platform that includes models for feature prioritization, one of which is the Impact-Effort model.

Key Features:

• 14-day free trial!
• User-friendly Interface.
• Creating roadmaps for project management.
• Building and sharing roadmap strategy.
• Feedback management and analysis
• Integration with Online tools such as Slack, Jira, Miro, Salesforce.
• Guru – Templates for Prioritization, Roadmap and Product management.
• Price starts at $39 month.

Third Step: The Final Rose

Some comments on how to choose the perfect partner—sorry, I mean the best feature to develop first.

1. Think about the customer—or rather, your core customer group. Who will benefit the most from the new features?
2.  You can’t please everyone. Start by pleasing many in one go.
3.  Be sure to estimate the effort required to develop each feature correctly. Don’t be shy to ask.
4. Don’t fall for your product. We do not develop products for ourselves.
5. Wrong prioritization can end the business; yes, it happens a lot. Ask your friends who recently changed their status on LinkedIn.

Just some of the topics we covered in this post: Feature Prioritization, SaaS Feature Marketing, Impact-Effort Model, RICE Model, Rice Scoring Model, Product Manager, Prioritize Features, SaaS Marketing, Project Manager.

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