How do you prioritize new features in your product?

Good prioritization can lead to a better product — one that meets the goals of your business and your customers.

So if you don’t have a clear answer, check this out.

Thread

TL;DR: There are a ton of prioritization frameworks out there. In the end, it comes down to personal preference, but the DIE framework will be a pretty solid choice for many indie hackers.

1. Value vs Effort Quadrant: Rate a feature's value to the business and the difficulty to implement it. Plot the resulting point on a quadrant chart. The sweet spot is the highest value with the lowest effort. High effort/low value gets the axe.

2. Value vs Risk Quadrant: Instead of effort, rate the risks (e.g. schedule risk, cost risk, and functionality risk). The idea is to go with high-risk/high-value first, as this will keep you from avoiding difficult tasks.

3. The Kano Model: This focuses on customer delight. Classify each feature as threshold (necessary and expected), performance (features that increase satisfaction), or excitement (disproportionately boost delight). Prioritize threshold, then excitement, then performance.

4. DIE: This one comes from @Shpigford of @Baremetrics. You measure demand, impact, and effort. Use the spreadsheet provided in the article. It's set up so that you'll actually want the lowest number possible, which is created by high demand, high impact, and low effort.

5. RICE Method: Rate reach, impact, confidence, and effort. Then figure out the total impact per time worked with this equation: Reach x Impact x Confidence / Effort.

6. Buy a Feature: Put a price tag on each feature based on the investment to develop it. Give a group of people (e.g. users, friends, etc.) a theoretical budget that is either a third or a half of the total cost of all the features. Then ask them to “buy" the features they want.

7. Opportunity Scoring: For improving existing features. Use polls to rate how important a feature upgrade is to users and how satisfied they currently are with the feature. Prioritize the most important/least satisfaction. Opportunity=Importance+max(Importance - Satisfaction, 0)

8. Financial Analysis: Analyze how many dollars each feature will bring in over a period of time through new revenue, incremental revenue (upgrades), retained revenue (reduced churn), and cost savings. Prioritize what brings in the most money.

9. Theme Screening: Set a list of criteria. For each criterion, select a feature that is likely to be included in the next release, and use it as the baseline. Score each feature with a +1, 0, or -1 compared to the baseline. Add up the scores to prioritize the features.

10. Consistent Customer Feedback: Common sense, but if you keep getting the same feedback from customers, that should probably be high-priority.

11. Gut Feelings: Yep, gut feelings made the list. They get short shrift, but they’re important — sometimes, you just know.

That's a very quick summary. For more info on each (plus 13 more frameworks), check out the original article https://www.indiehackers.com/post/product-features-24-methods-to-help-you-prioritize-features-59512383e3