Product Management 101: Prioritizing Customer Problems

Scoring models are flexible instruments for determining where the customer benefit lies and in what order should you solve customer problems. They will help you determine where your engineers should focus their efforts in the short and long term. The following article covers different scoring models; try different ones and see what works best to tell the story of your product most effectively.

Scoring for differentiation: The Kano model

There are basically two ways you can win in the products marketplace: Make it cheap or do it differently. At IKEA, for example, every development project starts with the final cost. The company knows that its customers are looking for a cost-effective solution and are developing its products accordingly. On the other hand, a luxury handbag starts with a concept of how different it can be from other handbags in the market, and then designers spare no effort or expense to create something unique.

Most products fall somewhere between these two extremes. The key idea here is that customers are more likely to choose one product than another. The Kano model is one way to categorize the product’s features to get a better idea of how your product fits one of the extremes. Every product in the Kano model can be classified into one of three categories: must-haves, performance and delight.

Must-haves: A feature in the must-have category is the sheer minimum.

Performance: A performance characteristic is one where more is considered better.

Delight: The customers are delighted with the functions and generally go “Wow!” after experiencing it.

Scoring for efficient use of development resources: Value versus effort analysis

In many cases, you prioritize and have a flair for many options of how much effort each of these activities takes. To choose the opportunity that offers the most bang for the buck, you’ll often want to choose the one that requires the least development time and money, and at the same time, provides the highest value to customers. Using the four-quadrant value-to-customer analysis, you can do this quickly and easily.

The quadrants are as follows -

1. Quadrant IV: High value, lower cost or risk

2. Quadrant II: High value, higher cost or risk

3. Quadrant III: Low value, lower cost or risk

4. Quadrant I: Low value, higher cost or risk

Buying features

If you are curious to know how valuable a particular feature is, let your customers spend cold money (or a facsimile) on them. It is an excellent way to see how they make trade-offs. Give each customer a fixed amount of play money to allocate to the available functions. If a feature is worth a lot to many people, they’ll spend more money on it. Less valuable functions get less money. As simple as that.

Apart from the ones listed above, there are many other ways to help you prioritize the features that you should work on first. If you are familiar with any, do share it with us in the comment section. That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.