When you’re getting fitted for glasses, your optometrist will often ask you to compare two potential lenses by alternately showing each of them (“which of these lenses is better—number one or number two?”). Although it may take some time, eventually you’ll settle on the set of lenses that are best for your eyes. You can use a variant of this approach to help your customers see which priorities are best for them, as customers often have trouble “seeing” which features are the highest priority, especially if you’re asking them to compare several features at the same time.

Start by writing one feature each on large index cards. Shuffle the pile and put them face down. Take the first one from the top of the pile and put it on the wall. Take the next one and ask your customers if it is more or less important than the one on the wall. If it is more important, place it higher. If it is less important, put it lower. Avoid placing the item at the same level; try hard to rank each feature. Repeat this process with all your feature cards, and you’ll develop 20/20 vision for what your market really wants. Click here to understand other characteristics about the game.

Although just about every customer knows that they can’t have everything they want in a product, they also know that, until you work with them to prioritize features, they have the upper hand in asking you for whatever they want. Perhaps more importantly, features of complex products are interrelated, and the product design and development team often faces a continuum of possible solutions that could meet customer needs. Asking your customers to prioritize a list of features without providing them the opportunity to explore design continuums or dependencies often results in misunderstanding. By facilitating discussions of feature priorities with several customers, you will give them the chance to explore design continuums and relationships that result in a better understanding of market needs.

You’ll need a list of between 8 and 20 features to prioritize, one feature per card. Write the feature on the front of the card and the benefit statements ascribed to this feature on the back because customers will often ask about benefits during the playing of the game (see Figure 2.19). Create three to four identical sets of feature cards because some of the variants of the game described next use more than one set of cards.

For each feature card that you create, prepare a simple set of design continuums for this feature. A design continuum is a set of high-level design alternatives prepared by the development team that helps shape a possible feature. Design continuums usually range from a “low” to a “high,” with an associated high-level analysis of the merits and implications of the choice. For example, suppose you were creating a kitchen timer and you were considering the materials for the case. A “low-end” casing could be plastic (cheap, easily colored, easily breakable), a “mid-range” casing could be aluminum (more expensive, durable), and a “high-end” casing could be one of the higher grades of austenitic stainless steel (expensive, durable, resistant to corrosion). This helps prepare you for playing the game; customers will often ask questions about a feature that can be framed around design continuums, with the ensuing discussion providing significant help to the development team in understanding market needs.

Play the game with internal stakeholders (sales, customer service, technical support, the development team) before playing it with real customers. You’ll gain valuable insights into the priorities of your team while also increasing your comfort with using this technique. This is especially important when you’re unclear of the strategic corporate priorities that are driving your company or your product.

This game is easily explained, and it is best if the facilitator gets started quickly after the explanation is complete. The first two or three features are usually prioritized quickly and easily. The process starts to slow down as customers typically start to ask more questions about new features being added to the growing list and spend more time debating the location of previously prioritized features. Your goal is to encourage the debate, but to do so you’ll need to answer their questions about features. Customers often change priorities by adjusting choices on design continuums. For example, customers may start by wanting the “mid-range” aluminum casing, but find themselves accepting the “low-end” plastic casing when more features are added to the prioritization discussion.

See Figure 2.20: Organizing Feature Cards

Customers often want to group features into sets—these three features are A, these are B, and so forth. Do all that you can to avoid this; it makes processing the results more challenging. If you find that you can’t guide them against grouping, try making multiple passes over the features. The first pass groups features into must-have, nice-to- have, and don’t-care or don’t-want features. You should be able to do this fairly quickly. The second pass ranks each of the features contained within these groups.

Customers will sometimes ask you to break a single feature into multiple features, combine two or more features into a single feature, or add a new feature. These are generally good things to do because they will provide you with a greater understanding of customer desires and motivations. The facilitator should be the person who makes this decision.

See Figure 2.21: Facilitating Multiple Groups

You may find that “clumps” of customers differ significantly in their prioritization of features, to the point where the facilitator cannot guide the larger team to consensus on the ranking of features. If this happens, and as a matter of last resort, split the single group of customers into two or three smaller groups that can be structured to reach agreement. Do this carefully, however, because the value of this technique is in observing how customers discuss feature priorities and design continuums with each other, and splitting customers by definition limits the debate.

Splitting groups of customers during the game is not the same as forming groups of customers at the beginning of the game and running multiple concurrent discussions. Splitting a group should generally be avoided because the power of the game is watching the group struggle with the prioritizations. Running multiple concurrent discussions, with a single facilitator running each discussion, is a way to compare and contrast the relative prioritizations of different customer groups.

Processing the results of the 20/20 Vision game is often quite straightforward. You simply transcribe the final prioritized list, keeping track of significant choices relative to design continuums. The results are then used to inform your product road map, with higher priority features being delivered more quickly.

After you’ve defined your market-facing priorities, you need to take this list to your development/engineering team and ask them to create a dependency list. You might find that, although your customer ranked a given feature low on their list of features, your technical team has identified it as an essential prerequisite to one or more of the more highly ranked features. As a result, you will find that the final list of features doesn’t necessarily match the ranking provided by your customers.

There are other considerations that you should include when preparing the final set of feature priorities. Consider the old adage that goes something like this: “If you try to please everyone, you’ll end up pleasing no one.” It is true. Keep in mind that each stakeholder affected by the product is likely to have a different ranking of features and that understanding these rankings is critical to producing an effective result. One technique that I find helpful in doing this is to create a spreadsheet that assigns weightings to features based on stakeholder prioritization and then computes a weighted sum across stakeholders. The advantage of this approach is that it allows you to include an arbitrary number of stakeholders, from customers (by direct customer or by market segment) to service, sales and support, distribution channels, strategic partners, and so forth.

Suppose, for example, that you’re ranking features for a blender. You’ve played the 20/20 Vision game with four market segments, listed in order of importance: Home Bakers, Parents Who Don’t Cook Much, Elementary School Teachers, and Professional Chefs. Your primary market segment is the home market, which by market size is roughly twice as large as the other markets. As a result, you weight the Home Baker so that their votes are the most influential in the process. (See Figure 2.22).

Putting the results into this kind of spreadsheet can be quite enlightening. In this simple example, we can see that while the Home Baker thinks that the Super Quiet Motor is the third most important potential feature, the other market segments consider it relatively unimportant. The weighted ranking results in this feature being the least important (lower numbers are better in the ranking). As the product manager, you can certainly still put the Super Quiet Motor higher than last place, but you’ll be doing this with the knowledge that most of your market considers this to be a relatively unimportant feature. This may be the best choice, based on factors not shown in this small sample (see the sidebar on ranking features). As you can guess, playing around with weightings can produce different results, and the spreadsheet format typically gives you an easy way to explore these options.

A final processing step concerns the handling of negotiations about the relative priority of each feature. It is useful to examine observer cards about which customers negotiated most passionately about the relative ranking of a given feature, as this gives insight into individual customer and customer segment preferences.

• Feature cards, as described earlier

• Additional blank cards to capture new features suggested during the game

One of the more common mistakes facilitators make when playing this game is giving in too easily to customer requests that a given feature be made the same priority as other features. If this happens too frequently you can end up with large groupings of equally important features, which defeats the purpose of playing the game in the first place.

To help you avoid giving in too easily after a customer suggests that one feature should be at the same level as another, simply acknowledge the request, restate the goals of the game, ask the group if anyone else would prioritize the feature differently, and silently and slowly count to nine. Most people find the silence uncomfortable and will start discussing and negotiating the priority of the feature in greater detail. If you do this consistently you’ll find that you end up with more granularity in the prioritizations and far fewer groupings of related features.

20/20 Vision provides essential insights into customer priorities, but it isn’t the only information that product managers should use to make feature prioritization choices. Product features can be analyzed according to many different attributes of varying degree of importance. Arguably the most important sets of attributes not captured by this game are the positive and negative economic attributes associated with each feature.

Positive economic attributes include such things as increased revenue, retained customers, brand value, product line synergies, and so forth. Negative attributes include such things as development, distribution, marketing and sales costs, development risk, and opportunity costs. Knowing these is crucial to making sustainable profitable products.

Another important set of attributes is how customer segments react to the presence or absence of features and “how much” of a feature influences their behavior. Kano analysis, which classifies features in four dimensions, can provide further insights into customer desires. The four key dimensions of a Kano analysis are

1. “Surprise and Delight” features. These really make your product stand out from the others. Customers will pay a premium for these features.

2. “More is Better” features. Customers will pay more to get more.

3. “Required” features. You can’t sell the product without these features.

4. “Dissatisfiers.” Features that customers don’t like and avoid about your product. It is unlikely that these features will be present in a 20/20 Vision game.

Like so many other aspects of product management, feature prioritization is a mixture of science and art. Sorting features according to various attributes certainly helps, but spreadsheets alone won’t help you make the right decisions.