Slides Andrew Breen recently used in his discussion w/ mentees of The Product Mentor. The Product Mentor is a program designed to pair Product Mentors and Mentees from around the World, across all industries, from start-up to enterprise, guided by the fundamental goals…Better Decisions. Better Products. Better Product People. Throughout the program, each mentor leads a conversation in an area of their expertise that is live streamed and available to both mentee and the broader product community. http://TheProductMentor.com

1. Quantitative, Qualitative,
Intuitive Feature
Prioritization
with Andrew Breen
The Product Mentor

2. Who am I?
● 20+ years building tech products across
multiple industries ranging from early stage
to large companies
● Particular focus on mobile/communication
● Broad experience in the product
development process (Agile)
● Recently installed as VP, Product Delivery at
American Express

3. What’s your Approach?
● Have a philosophy about product dev
● Be more of a referee than a player...but don’t
be afraid to have a point of view
● Remove the subjectivity: cite quantitative
and/or qualitative facts to avoid opinions
● Be transparent getting stakeholders and
product team involved early and intimately
so there’s ownership and autonomy

4. What does a Product Manager do?
As Product Manager, you are the driver for the
product development process. You have many
stakeholders, inputs and team members
depending on your prioritization.
How do we do that using quantitative,
qualitative and intuitive feature prioritization?

5. What is the Product Triangle?
User/Customer
Business Goals Operational
Execution
Your job is to be
the advocate for
the user
balancing that
against business
goals and
operational
constraints

6. Who are your Users/Customers?
What are your (potential) users telling you
behaviorally?
Usage/engagement data, transactions, surveys, focus groups, user testing

7. How do you use Engagement Data?
● Find site/app metrics that actually show how
people are using your product
○ Avoid facade metrics that include non-engaged
users (e.g. pageviews)
○ How successful are people with your product?
● Keep it simple: Divide by active users,
transactions or other meaningful core metric
○ Use funnel metrics to assess flow/drop-off for core
use-cases

8. What can be gleaned from surveys?
● Used for direction and to measure sentiment
● Have a clear objective and avoid bias
● Be specific and brief
● Limit open ended questions but offer them
● Use incentives to attract a wider audience
● Don’t overuse surveys or their data
○ Esp if not a statistically significant representation of
your audience)

9. What about Focus Groups and User
Testing?
● Gain detailed sentiment with a focus group
of 4-10 (potential) customers
○ Group facilitating brainstorming/feedback
○ Used as top level inputs; not quantifiable
● User Tests for one-on-one usability feedback
○ Test prototypes by asking users to finish tasks
○ Do not answer questions, respond with a question
○ Do not draw any conclusions until you test it with at
least 5 people looking for patterns

10. Who are your Business Goals?
What are your stakeholders telling you is
important?
Translating business priorities into actionable tasks

11. How do You Form Business Goals?
● The KPI (Key Performance Indicators) that the company
measures its business against
● True from day 1 to day n of the company
● Examples:
○ New user registrations per time period
○ Transactions/Revenue per time period
○ Minutes engaged with product per session
○ New customer funnel completion rate
● All newly proposed features should be measured in how
they impact these

12. Who are Stakeholders?
● Sponsor/expert/key influencer for a feature
● For every major feature, be sure to have a
stakeholder (and it can’t be you/your team)
○ If you can’t find one, you likely shouldn’t be doing it
● Get stakeholder buy-in at strategic
development points: before you begin work
and when you believe its ready
○ Make them feel like an owner

13. Who are Your Execution Concerns?
What is your team telling you impacts
developing, releasing and supporting this?
Constraints and risks

14. What is involved in realizing this?
● Execution team: design, dev, QA, copywriting,
etc who will build it (+25-50% to any LoEs)
● What will the impact be on support?
● How will customers know about and get it?
What is the messaging and positioning?
● Are there partners involved?
● Are there any constraints or risks that need to
be better understood?

15. How do we use this to form a plan?
What is a roadmap anyway?
Impact, complexity, themes, charts and tasks

16. How do we use Impact vs. Complexity?
Business impact is
measurable
improvement of core
metrics by the
feature
Complex items are
ones with many
unknowns/high risks
1. Initial Focus 2. Big ticket items
1a. Low-Hanging Fruit X. Avoid
Impact
ComplexityLow
High
High

17. What are Themes?
● Temporal “soft” priorities that make sure you
focus on what’s impactful and relevant now
● Generally quarterly but can have overlap
○ At most, one should be winding down while another
is ramping up
● Example:
Improve user
engagement
Today
Grow customer base
Q2
Better monetize
customers
Q3
Expand into new region
Q4

18. The Product Chart as Roadmap
● More for managing stakeholders than the
product team
○ But your team should be aware of what is committed
● Have swimlanes (by theme, product group or
customer segment)
● Directional (or time indicative) vs. hard times
○ Active, Next, Likely, Probably, Maybe
○ Don’t be overly specific boxing yourself in

19. Sample Product Chart
Feature 1
Improvement X
Feature 2 Feature 8 Feature 14
Feature 15
Feature 16
Improvement Y Feature 3
Feature 4
Feature 9 Feature 17
Feature 18
Feature 19
Feature 5 Improvement Z
Feature 6
Feature 10
Feature 11
Feature 20
Feature 21
Feature 7 Feature 12
Feature 13
Feature 22
Feature 23
Active Next Likely Probably Maybe
Lane1Lane2Lane3Lane4
On Track
Blocked/Issues
Off Track

20. Product Team View (Kanban Style)
Improvement Z Feature 2 Feature 1 ... ... ...
Feature 6 Feature 3 Improvement X
Feature 7 Feature 4 Improvement Y
Feature 8 Feature 5
Feature 9
Feature 10
Feature 11
Feature 12
Backlog To Do Doing To Test To Accept To Release
HigherPriority
NOTE: typically bigger
features are broken
down into stories and
then tasks at this level
for execution

21. Product Case (for new Features)
Who is the customer/user? Who is the target for this feature? Are there more than one (e.g. end-user and internal support)?
What problem/need do they have? Focus on the problem/need for the user and/or the opportunity for us.
What are the primary use-cases? Enumerated list kept at a high-level. These will be translated into detailed user stories by the team but these
should be detailed enough to decide what is essential for an MVP (but this list should not define MVP).
What are constraints to consider? Are there boundaries or other limitations (internal or external) to consider when planning this?
How do we go to market? How do we promote this to new/existing customers? How do we raise awareness?
How do we monetize/What are cost considerations? Is this feature monetized separately or as part of an existing offering?
What are the price points and cost aspect?
What is supporting data? What data (quantitative and/or qualitative) do we have to support this feature? If it's new/different enough that we don’t have
easily quantifiable analytics, what are proxies we can use (e.g. customer surveys/focus groups, competitive, etc)?
What are the key results? What are the measurable results we expect to achieve with this project? Make sure they are both concrete and not easily
done just by creating this.

22. And that’s a Wrap...
User engagement + impact on KPI + thematic
relevance + execution risk = priority
So what’s the intuitive part?
These best practices, tools, techniques and your
good judgement