How Much Is That Feature In The Window?
In this episode, we try to answer the question, one that I’m sure you’ve gotten a lot from your executives – “How much money will we make from this feature?” This question came up for me and Rob multiple times in the last few weeks. First, someone asked for advice on one of the product management message boards. Then Rob presented a roadmap to his executives and got the question. Not long after that Nils got the question during a roadmap presentation. It’s a favorite for executives.
There are multiple ways to approach this question and in the podcast we explore a few techniques. In summary: Don’t put a feature or epic on the roadmap if you can’t justify it. You should know who is going to use it in your market segment. You have expectations of how it will move the needle on revenue, based on how valuable the problem is to your target customers. It’s still a guess, and still predicting the future, but it’s not unreasonable to have that information in your back pocket.
Just remember that the VP of Sales has to do this every year, and every quarter, on arguably less data than we even have. After all, we should know about customers that are going to use this feature, how it will help us get new customers, or sell faster, and so on.
“Not all that can be measured counts, and not all that counts can be measured,” said Albert Einstein. This goes just as much for features in products. But sometimes we have to put a stake in the ground.
Related information
Previous blog posts and podcasts on this and related topics include:
- More advice on how to share a roadmap without running off the road.
- The importance of finding and validating customer problems (which gives you the information you need to estimate the value of a solution to the problems).
- How to make more money – the small set of ways your new feature will make your company more money.
As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. You can reach us at all the normal ways:
- Twitter – Nils is @nilsie, Rob is @robmcgrorty, and the show is @atrnota
- You can leave a comment on this site
- You can leave a comment and a rating on iTunes – or just subscribe here.
Many thanks to Neat Beats for our amazing intro and outro music. Definitely check them out on Spotify and Bandcamp!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:27 — 28.9MB)
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