Kill the HiPPO #
by Steve McLeod and Siew Ann Tan
A brief guide to feature prioritisation for first-time product managers in small software companies.
This site is a work in progress, made public for review and feedback.
Be notified when we add new chapters:
We interviewed several bootstrapped software companies, each with about 20 to 50 employees. We asked the founder and/or product manager at each company about how they prioritise new features, and how that process has changed over time.
We discovered that:
- this is a process that every team struggles with.
- the simplistic approaches are seldom used, typically don’t work well, and are usually soon abandoned by those who try them.
- founders and product managers put a lot of thought into how to best do this at their company.
- there is a surprising amount of variety and uniqueness in the solutions that the teams we talked to have come up with.
Much of the writing on feature prioritisation for software teams is implicitly biased towards teams in large organisations, more often than not backed by venture capital.
Such writing doesn’t reflect what actually happens in small, bootstrapped companies that are not chasing hypergrowth.
So we interviewed teams to reveal how feature prioritisation actually happens. Not how it is described in books but how teams decide, given limited resources, incomplete data, hard-to-predict future events, and the reality of human behaviour.
We are adding new chapters roughly once per month.
TODO:
- conduct another 5 to 7 interviews (3 done so far)
- prepare drafts of each outstanding interview
- hire professional editor
- illustrate
- prepare title art
- get early testimonials
- invite well-regarded industry person to write foreword
- typeset as PDF
- distribute
