by Shaun Jayaraj

Shaun Jayaraj suggests a couple of practical ways for the product owners to find the happy balance between needs and wants while creating a new product. This short but concise essay is a quick guide for the product owner to jump start on prioritizing the product backlog

Why Do I Care?

One of the primary role of a product manager is to prioritize the numerous features into a release of a product. Few of these features may be a “need to have” feature while the rest will be a “want to have” feature.

Differentiate Needs from Wants!

“Need” is something that your end users are assuming your product has and won’t necessarily be wowed by its presence. This feature is usually something like a regulatory requirement or security feature or may be the basic feature set of your product. Lets take an web email portal as an example, any new client would expect to be able to send and receive emails. There is an expectation that only an authorized user can view their emails. You cannot have a viable web based email without out a log in and log out feature. However something like tagging emails or being able to search all your inbox blazing fast is not a need.

“Want” is something that will set you apart from competition, this could be anything from a killer feature set like the touch screen interface when the iphone first came out or performance feature that out paces everything in the market . Like what google was when it first released its software.

It is a product managers job to balance the need and want feature set and come up with a compelling product that both satisfies all the target demographics needs as well has enough wow features to make users want to use your software over the competitors software.

One way to come up with the right mix is to split all your features into “Needs” and “Wants” category and then pick the highest priority wants and needs. Making a clear distinction between the two types of features, lets you maintain a right balance.

Conclusion

If you are trying to build a utility software, then your final list should probably be heavy on the “needs”, while if you are in the business of building Strategic software, then you are better off going with the bare minimum need features and pick and choose your highest wants.