Being apart of a rapidly growing startup, we have quickly discovered our need to adopt a process for prioritizing and building out features. In this post I will describe the process we have created.
Our goals:
- Allow every team to contribute input to the product.
- Quantitatively determine which pain points are the most urgent / important.
- Solve as many of those pain points with the least amount of work.
Our solution:
- Allocate a certain number of points to each team.
- Have teams ‘spend’ their points on pain points they discover (ex: 10 points on not being able to contact an admin, and 40 points on having to hit the back button after updating your profile).
- Consolidate similar pain points across all teams
- Brainstorm possible features to solve top ranked pain points
- Calculate which features satisfy the most points for the least amount of work
- Get coding
We have called this process “The Bounty Marketplace”
One core reason we have opted for this approach is we feel it is important to understand the pain points of each team instead of the requested “features”. When you are working across multiple teams (and multiple levels of users in our case), finding similarities in pain points allows you to effectively solve as many problems as possible with minimal effort.
You friendly coders at
btw, we’re hiring :)