Mike Lyons argues that saying yes to too many ideas kills products. He shares two prioritization techniques: Buy a Feature, where stakeholders spend fake money to expose real priorities, and High Value Jobs, which ranks customer needs by importance and unmet demand.
The difference between successful products and failed ones often comes down to saying no to good ideas. So you can say yes to great ones, but how do you cut through the noise and focus on what truly matters to your customers? Marketing wants new dashboards, sales wants custom reports. And of course, engineering. They want to refactor the code base. But without a systematic approach to prioritization, you'll end up with a bloated product that tries to please everyone but delights no one. I. I learned this lesson the hard way. Early in my career. I was on a team building a customer service platform for a major university and we had stakeholders from six different departments. Initially, we tried to accommodate everyone. That was an awful approach. We quickly fell behind schedule with features that only a few people were using. That wasn't working. So we tried to satisfy the loudest voices, you know, the ones who complain the loudest or the most. Well, then the quiet voices became loud once they saw that's how work could get done. That didn't work either. So then we tried just asking the highest paid person's opinion. The Hippo approach. That person makes all the decisions. Well, that didn't work either because that person was so far removed from the day to day needs of our customers that we were just creating Nice to have features in all of this. Our mistake was not having clear objective criteria that everyone understood and then being ruthless about prioritization. Now, there's no shortage of prioritization techniques, but let me share a couple of examples that I've seen in the field. Okay, first let's look at the Buy A Feature. It's kind of a funny name. It reminds me of the Price is Right. How about Pramal Shah, come on down, you're the next contest and all that Price is Right. The buy a feature approach gives stakeholders a limited budget of fake imaginary money and asks them to purchase the features that they value most. This creates a sort of marketplace dynamic where stakeholders have to make trade offs. When someone spends say $700 of their thousand dollar pretend budget, they're demonstrating pretty strong commitment to that item. At Technova, you might run a buy a feature session with agency customers and then give each participant a thousand play dollars, fake dollars to spend across potential enhancements. This helps reveal not just what they say they want, but what they're willing to invest in. And what makes this technique powerful is that it simulates real world constraints. It forces honest prioritization by making the trade offs explicit and visible to everybody. It also creates buy in since stakeholders actively participate in the decision Making process. Buy in. Get it buy in because it's because of the money, because of the buy feature. Okay, so here's another tool we want to put in your hands to help you identify high value jobs. There's a link below and it's also in your student workbook. This is a template that helps you focus on the most important customer jobs to be done, ranking them on four key criteria. First, is the job important to customers? Second, is it tangible with clear outcomes? Third, is it currently unsatisfied by existing solutions? And fourth, is it lucrative? Are our customers willing to pay to get it done? For taskflow, you might discover that ensuring team members aren't overloaded scores high across all criteria. It's important to agency managers. It has tangible outcomes in employee retention and it isn't well addressed by competitors. And our agencies would pay to solve it. Well, this framework, it helps you identify the highest value jobs that your product should focus on solving. And by prioritizing these jobs, you ensure that your backlog addresses what truly matters to customers rather than just adding features. Okay, you might be wondering like when should you use each of these techniques? Buy a feature well that works well. When you have multiple stakeholders with competing interests, it creates an environment for making difficult trade offs and builds consensus around priorities. The high value jobs framework is most useful early in product planning. When you're determining which customer problems to solve. It ensures you're building features that address genuine needs rather than assumed ones. Remember that prioritization isn't a one time activity. As market conditions change and you gather customer feedback, priorities will shift. The key is having consistent frameworks that allow for objective decision making. Let me leave you with this. Good product owners build features. Great product owners solve problems. Your prioritization choices reveal which one you are. So choose wisely.
