Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By David Aronchick
You are one feature away from greatness. If only you had JUST that widget, Arrington would write about you, Walt Mossberg would fall all over himself, and you would make Twitter’s growth curve look like a Kansas mountain range. But it is a little like that old marketing axiom, “You waste half of your marketing budget, the problem is, which half is it?” So, with thousands of features out there and you with extremely limited time and bandwidth, which one are you going to work on next?
There are lots of ways to approach this problem. The first thing you should realize is that you will never have a dearth of “great ideas”, and, to address cornucopia of ideas, you had better get a way to evaluate the onslaught in a structured way. One particularly interesting (and to my knowledge, unique) example comes from a very successful Seattle company who chooses the “next great feature” by not even tracking incoming new features or ideas. Every Monday, they get together and simply talk about what they are going to work on for the week, based on what is top of mind for each of the team members. Their philosophy is simple – if something is really important, it will continue to bubble up and resurface when there is time to work on it. It’s feature choice by kismet, and it’s worked extremely well for them.
For those teams not ready to work in such a self-directed way, there are lots of alternatives. Some sample options include letting the users vote using Uservoice (or similartools), answering the squeaky wheel/noisiest user, or the ever popular “chasing the money”. But, regardless of what system you use, your users are not the final decision makers. They may love your site to death, but they simply are not wired to think about your business the same way you do. So now that you are down to a handful of things that have bubbled to the top, it is on to step two, selecting the best of the best. I like to categorize ideas with the following set of questions:
- How will implementing this idea affect our business? Unfortunately, far too many ideas have no grounding in how you make money. It is not an immediate discard if the idea is poorly aligned with your business plans – you can frequently salvage some goodness out of it – but you are certainly not going to let it go through as is.
- Where does this idea fall in regards to our future plans? Many times, your best “next” feature was already going to be built in a major release in another few months. But if this feels like the right time, it would not be the worst thing in the world to start tackling a portion of the problem now.
- Is this an idea which should have been implemented, we just have not had the time to do so? Whenever I run into one of these, I die a little bit inside. It could be something small – a link from one page to another that would save three steps – or something huge – a new way of uploading content – but, regardless of the size, do not underestimate the value to you or your team of fixing something you are ashamed you have not addressed already.
From the list of final ideas, and the questions above, you should be able to pick out your final selections, and act.
However, you are not done yet. You must avoid the final pitfall of allowing your idea to grow too big. Often times, because the team will be excited about FINALLY addressing something big, scope creep will inevitably result. You must be disciplined and keep the project focused – think weeks not months. You certainly will not get everything you want, but you will also not spin out of control, building something that is far larger than is necessary to take your next steps to greatness.
As you think about what may be, do not get caught up in the idea that the launch of “super terrific feature foo” is anything but a waypoint in your journey as an entrepreneur. There will always be something out there after this, and to focus too much on the near term is a recipe to becoming lazy and satisfied. If you listen correctly, you will have far too many requests from your team, users and business partners to pursue them all, but do not be overwhelmed. With the right philosophy for selection, and a clear vision to aim for, the tornado of ideas which could have been a headwind holding you back can become a tailwind helping you to eventual success.
