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One of the toughest problems every software product manager faces is how to prioritize all the feature requests submitted by customers, salespeople, executives, and other stakeholders.
It’s a hard one to address. A software product can easily have hundreds, if not thousands, of feature requests. Companies often use bug tracking software, or support incident software, to track feature requests. Unfortunately, these don’t provide any way to "connect" requests. That is, to state that request A is the same as request B, and start tracking which requests are the most popular.
There are requirements management applications from FeaturePlan and Accept that let you connect feature requests. However, a product manager (PM) still has to manually make these connections.
A dirty secret in the product management world is that product managers (PM’s) rarely, if ever, comb through these feature request repositories when formulating a product roadmap. It simply takes too much time and there are too many other demands on one’s time.
The upshot is that when a new release comes out, it’s very easy for people to second-guess the product manager. Sales will ask, "why is feature X not in the release?" A big customer will ask, "why is my requested feature not implemented?" Executives will ask, "is the PM really on top of customer needs?"
These kinds of questions, especially from executives, can hurt a product manager at review time. This is unfortunate, since PM’s typically do everything they can to provide a fair product roadmap.
This is why I’m very excited to learn about a new software application that lets stakeholders vote on product features. This is similar to how Digg lets users vote on stories, and how Dell Ideastorm lets users vote on feature ideas.
The application is called Pligg. It’s available for free download, and is hosted by several companies.
If usage of Pligg takes off among software companies, it could help our industry build much better products — and enable product managers to do much better jobs in less time.
I haven’t played with it yet, but am looking forward to doing so.
Have you used Pligg? Do you know of any other similar applications? Please let me know via the comments.
Mike 2:51 pm on August 14, 2007 Permalink |
voting on ideas though helpful, is marginally of value since you, as a decision maker, may be treating all votes as equal. The better approach is to weight those votes by the importance of the voter to the strategy that you are trying to achieve. For example if you can gather voter demographic data and see that votes from a certain target demographic can help you gain market share with that demographic then you are aligning and prioritizing rather than letting any ideas float to the top