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Build or don't build a software feature?

dont.build

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Re: Build or don't build a software feature?

#21

Post by jenscow »

smoyer wrote: post #19

This is a cool tool but it should differentiate between "users" and "customers" so that weighting is based on the potential for making paying users happy (or perhaps the word "user" should just be changed.) It also appears that these sliders are equally weighted but I find that these factors are NOT equally weighted based on a particular feature, the lifecycle of the product and the lifecycle of the company.

I was thinking the same, until I saw: How important are the target users to the existing product?

Re: Build or don't build a software feature?

#22

Post by Jensson »

bduffany wrote: post #11
pete_nic wrote: post #7

Great job on this decision making tool. One thing that might be missing - the business viability of the feature. All else being equal you prioritize features that add value to the company that builds them.

I'd guess that was intended to be captured with "how valuable is the feature to target users, truly?" If target users truly find the feature valuable then I guess that means the feature is adding value to the company.

Users don't find ads valuable, but plenty of businesses still wants developers to add ads to the product.

Re: Build or don't build a software feature?

#23

Post by rhynlee »

Interesting mental model you made here, I like it! Stuff like this definitely helps get people into system 2 thinking instead of going with intuition and in this case that's probably a good thing.

I thought seeing charts of how the answer would change along with each slider value for a given value range might help as others have mentioned it's not too easy to answer the questions accurately. Could help handle uncertainty since people would then be able to understand the range of answers in between their "best case" and "worst case"

Re: Build or don't build a software feature?

#24

Post by motohagiography »

This is ideal as a teaching tool. Related to another thread (dictator's handbook thread) I used salience models to help make feature decisions, which are a lot like story points poker without the overhead, but the effect is the same. The key challenge is getting honest assessments from people of the questions. Most people when provided a model will ask, "sure, how do I get it to say what I want it to say?" and if it doesn't say that, they won't accept that their desire is thwarted by principle.

Such a useful tool, and I foresee referring to it regularly.

Re: Build or don't build a software feature?

#25

Post by [deleted] »

jonathan_h wrote: post #9
moasda wrote: post #5

Interesting approach for a decision calculator. Why is the result always between 5% and 95%?

TL;DR: A minimum score of 1 messes with their formula. OP should consider changing it. Looking at the page's , I think it's because they set the minimum score to 1 rather than 0. In addition, for three of the questions, a high score is seen as a negative rather than a positive (e.g. a high score in "development effort" likely means "a lot of effort"), so behind the hood they invert those scores by doing (10 - score).…

[deleted]

Re: Build or don't build a software feature?

#27

Post by smoe »

Just a bit of a nitpick (or issue for non native speaker) maybe, the answers are confusing in relationship to the title.

Title: Don't build (or build) that feature

Answer: Yes

I think the way I selected the questions (high impact, low effort) it should tell me to build, but as I read it, the tool tells me either to not build or answers an OR question with yes or no.

Re: Build or don't build a software feature?

#28

Post by kevsim »

This is cool!

It's kind of similar to what the RICE/ICE frameworks are trying to help achieve [0].

We built some scoring of impact/effort into our tool Kitemaker [1] and allow teams to prioritize their work by these things. We ended up going with really simple scores like S/M/L since it's super hard to know the difference between a 6 and a 7 (and it probably doesn't really matter anyway).

0: https://medium.com/glidr/how-opportunity-scoring-can-help-pr...

1: https://kitemaker.co

Re: Build or don't build a software feature?

#29

Post by tnzk »

smoe wrote: post #27

Just a bit of a nitpick (or issue for non native speaker) maybe, the answers are confusing in relationship to the title. Title: Don't build (or build) that feature Answer: Yes I think the way I selected the questions (high impact, low effort) it should tell me to build, but as I read it, the tool tells me either to not build or answers an OR question with yes or no.

"Go" or "Hold on" would be better?
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