Developing our product strategy - one idea at a time

Published by James on the 19th February 2008 1 Comment »

Since joining ProcServe just under a year ago, one of the problems I’ve had to contend with has been answering the question: what should our product do? As with any young company that is growing fast, there are hundreds of things we could develop and add to our repertoire. Bells and whistles all round. It is one of the problems of working in the world of software, we can literally do anything. Knowing which bells and whistles to add and which to leave well alone goes a major way, in my opinion, to making the difference between a bloated, confusing application and a simple, lightweight, easy to use product.

It’s my job to make sure we end up with the latter and not the former.

In order to achieve this goal, we needed a way of filtering all the ideas and requests for features that were coming to the development team from around the business. We needed to qualify each idea in a way that allowed everyone to have a say, raise an idea with us, but in a way that let us give priority to those ideas that would be profitable and useful for all our customers.

So we introduced our ProcServe Idea Scorecard.

A simple Word document that anyone can fill in and send to me when they have a new idea. On the form we capture some basic information about the idea itself; we give it a name, they add a description, their name and a date.

Myself and the idea owner then sit down together and discuss the idea, scoring it with one of three possible scores based on the scores matrix below:

Input	Positive score	Neutral score	Negative score
Impact / cost to development	+100 - (Tweak to the system)	0 - (Some work based on what’s built)	-100 - (Massive development / redesign)
Potential revenue / savings	+100 - (£100,000 +)	0 - (<£100,000)	-100 - (£0)
Market need	+100 - (They’re beating our door down for this)	0 - (One or two customers are interested)	-100 - (It’s a bit of a hunch)
Risk	+100 - (We can’t fail to get this right)	0 - (Could go either way)	-100 - (There’s a good change this’ll not realise it’s potential)
Impact on Buyer users	+100 - (This will make their lives much easier)	0 - (Doesn’t help, but doesn’t hinder)	-100 - (Their work load just got slower / longer / more complex)
Impact on Supplier users	+100 - (This will make their lives much easier)	0 - (Doesn’t help, but doesn’t hinder)	-100 - (Their work load just got slower / longer / more complex)
Impact on Support users	+100 - (This will make their lives much easier)	0 - (Doesn’t help, but doesn’t hinder)	-100 - (Their work load just got slower / longer / more complex)
Impact on Developers	+50 - (This will make their lives much easier)	0 - (Doesn’t help, but doesn’t hinder)	-50 - (Their work load just got slower / longer / more complex)
Impact on the system	+50 - (This will make their lives much easier)	0 - (Doesn’t help, but doesn’t hinder)	-50 - (Their work load just got slower / longer / more complex)

Once all the scores are tallied up the idea has an overall score. If that score is negative then the idea will not be worked on or developed further. If the idea has a positive score it is put into a pile of currently working on ideas. Ideas with the highest scores are worked with by the development team first.

The owners of the ideas that come out with negative scores are encouraged to try re-qualifying them (by getting more customers interested, or finding more cost savings, etc).

Once a month all the ideas that currently have a positive score are discussed in a product strategy team that represents every area of the business to do a sense check and make sure one person doesn’t have too much influence over which ideas we work on.

So far this process has been working really well for us, we have implemented several high scoring ideas in the last few development cycles, and we have a stack of well thought through, qualified ideas that have been planned in for the next three releases.

Posted in ProcServe, Productivity, Business, Process |