Building features is addictive.

Building new features can be quite addictive. In your very early days, each new feature represents a large increment of new value to your product, and gets you more sign ups, downloads, or sales. But over time, each new feature doesn’t give you this same benefit.

Instead, you end up adding to a Frankenstein of a product that has all of the features and none of the utility. Early habits of moving fast and getting new features out with incredible velocity can actually lead you astray!

Problem: Constantly chasing the next idea.

It’s typical for teams to get stuck in a feature factory, where they are constantly chasing the next idea and spending a lot of effort on getting work out the door, but not a lot of effort on making sure that they are doing the right work in the first place.

Some typical patterns to watch for include:

  • Having lots of ideas and very specific ways of prioritizing the ‘right’ idea, but those methods tend to be very sensitive to changes in the market or even opinion. It can be very time consuming to work on a prioritization method for a bunch of ideas, only to find that the result doesn’t seem correct or leads you astray anyways.
  • Lots of emphasis on moving quickly and getting work out the door. Watch for terms like ‘agile cadence’, ‘burn down’, ‘velocity’. These are metrics that measure your ability to ship fast, but not the ability to ship well, or to ship the right things.
  • Very little time granted to validating that past launches were successful and impactful, and that the right things were actually shipped. A common habit is to launch ‘experiments’ but not actually check the results of the experiments properly, or act on them.

 

Solution: Prioritize at the problem level.

A better approach is to take a step back and prioritize at the problem level, not at the idea level. 

This tends to avoid the trouble of getting stuck in a very granular priority system (like stack ranking or weighted scoring for ideas), and instead allows your team to focus on the company-level objectives and figuring out the order in which to tackle the chunky problems and opportunities ahead.

It’s best practice to start with a product vision, high-level objectives (like Objectives & Key Results), and then outline the main problems/opportunities/challenges ahead that would line up with that vision and objectives. 

ProdPad guides you to prioritize at the problem level, so you’re always focused on solving the right problems, rather than building whatever floats to the top of your stack-ranked backlog. This is why we don’t have an idea sorting algorithm, but do work with objectives & key results, and outcome-based roadmapping techniques.

 

Lean roadmap in ProdPad

ProdPad’s lean roadmap format is designed to help you prioritize problems first, and creates clear associations with the objectives that each roadmap card (AKA problem/initiative) will help solve, as well as all of the ideas (AKA experiments) that could be tried in order to solve each problem. 

It’s an experiment-driven roadmap that gives your entire team the visibility they need into your product development process, while ensuring that you’re keeping enough of an eye on the bigger picture and the smaller opportunities, to enable you to make the best product decisions.

You can explore the lean roadmap format live in our Sandbox environment: https://sandbox.prodpad.com/products/4d20d0f0-7de1-11e8-8e97-011809fd47b5/roadmap

 

ProdPad solves the feature factory problem and many others!

 

Have you got other problems you're looking to solve?

 

PS. Want all of these in a presentation format so you can convince your boss and team to use ProdPad to solve these problems? Grab your copy here!