Scenario 1: Plugin Feature Prioritization
You’re managing an SEO plugin with the following three highly requested feature suggestions from users:
- Integration with Google Search Console for performance reporting
- A real-time content optimization assistant (e.g., keyword suggestions while typing)
- Schema markup generator for FAQs, articles, and reviews
Question
How would you evaluate and prioritize these features for the next two quarters? What factors would you consider? How would you validate your decisions?
In order to effectively prioritise, instead of looking at features, we must understand their outcomes.
How are these features helping users to achieve their SEO outcomes? How are they supporting our business goals?
I’m going to use a lot of hypotheticals in order to demonstrate my approach to this question.
RankMath’s mission is to “to make WordPress SEO less hassle and more fun“.
Let’s assume that our North Star metric is user growth so we are doing everything we can to attract new users and retain existing users.
We should also understand what our competitors are doing, do they offer something similar so this is achieving feature parity (because we have many detractors due to lack of this feature built-in?) Or is this something that would be unique to RankMath?
We should also consider if some or all of it could be a paid-for feature. Is it a can’t-live-without feature worth paying for?
Finally, does this increase the stickiness of our product? Are users going to be returning RankMath again and again to use it?
User Research
By undertaking user research, we can understand the job to be done. What are users trying to achieve by requesting this feature? Most users have a solution mindset, but we need to validate what their desired outcome really is.
It’s also important to conduct user research to understand how many customers truly want and need the requested feature, what types of users it benefits and how they would rank the 3 features, e.g. “If we could only implement one, which one would it be?”
Let’s assume that we conduct the user research and we get the following answers:
| Feature | Persona | Job to be done | Customer Need Ranking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console Integration | Advanced users, Agencies (30% of user base) | View keyword ranking performance per-page inside WordPress | 3 |
| Real-time content optimisation | All levels of users (80% of user base) | Achieve successful page ranking straight out of the gate | 1 |
| Schema markup generator for FAQs, articles, and reviews | Advanced users and WooCommerce stores (60% of user base) | Increase search appearances | 2 |
Having this knowledge, I would now start to build out a subset of potential features that could be included in each feature and align with the user needs and the business mission, considering anything that could be a revenue-driver. During this time, I would also be in close contact with an SEO expert to ensure continuous alignment with SEO goals/benefit to the user.
Technical Discovery
Having understood the customer need, it’s time to start doing some technical discovery. In my team we would nominate a Lead Engineer and I would be in discussion with them about what we could deliver. These discussions help to give me first indicators of how difficult something might be to build and highlight any risks.
I would then host a project kickoff to align stakeholders and engineers, outlining the outcome and the ideal features to include.
During our daily standups, any insights or learning is shared, and it’s a good time for the other engineers to engage in the process and provide feedback. Once this stage is completed, a 3 amigos session would be run for each session to provide focused conversation. This helps to clarify technical approach, testing and measurement. The outcome of this would be t-shirt sizing.
| Feature | T-Shirt size |
|---|---|
| Google Search Console Integration | Medium – 2 |
| Real-time content optimisation | Large – 3 |
| Schema markup generator for FAQs, articles, and reviews | Small – 1 |
Incremental shipping
Given that we plan to deliver these features over two quarters, we should work out if these features could be shipped incrementally. Search Console has many facets, but delivering the core value first, measuring success and reviewing the roadmap regularly ensures that we don’t deliver something that isn’t useful.
Whether deciding to ship incrementally or all in one go, I like to go back to customers who’ve requested the feature to see if the what is planned meets expectations.
Prioritisation
For this exercise, I will demonstrate prioritisation on each feature as a whole, but as mentioned above, it is likely that incremental shipping would be done over the 2 quarter timeline.
I would use the RICE prioritisation framework in order to evaluate each feature fairly as it provides the most-objective methodology for data-driven decision making and seeks to align and engage the whole team.
Reach Scoring
Assuming there are 3,000 signups per month, I used the % of user base impacted by each featured outlined above multiplied by 3000 to create my Reach score.
Impact Scoring
To define impact, I used “Increase in MAUs” as my measurement since our North Star metric is user growth.
I also took into consideration the uniqueness of the feature (after conducting competitor research) and how likely the feature is to be used when users are doing everyday activities in WordPress.
- 1 – 5 – Five being the highest impact and 1 being very low impact.
Completed RICE scoring
| Feature | Reach | Impact | Confidence | Effort | RICE score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console Integration | 900 | 1 | 80% | 2 | 360 |
| Real-time content optimisation | 2,400 | 5 | 100% | 3 | 4,000 |
| Schema markup generator for FAQs, articles, and reviews | 1,800 | 3 | 60% | 1 | 3,240 |
Based on the RICE score, I would prioritise the highest scoring feature first: real-time content optimisation, then schema markup and finally GSC integration.
Roadmap planning
These three features will not be the only things we deliver over two quarters. It’s important to engage other stakeholders in the roadmap planning as there may be other ideas and plans to work towards (and these may have specific deadlines), BAU, technical debt etc.
Additionally there may also be dependencies on other teams and third parties to consider when working out how to prioritise these features.
By sharing the other goals and objectives for the quarter along with reminding ourselves of the metrics we’re going after, we can work together to create the roadmap. By holding this meeting with our stakeholders, it gives everyone a chance to contribute and get alignment.