Kill the HiPPO wasn’t originally going to be a book, in the traditional sense. It was going to be a series of online articles describing several different prioritisation frameworks, also available as a single, downloadable PDF.

The plan was that this content would promote my software company, Feature Upvote, which was going to be mentioned in each article.

We started researching the topic and found that:

1. Most product management tools already had this type of content on their website; and
2. Without exception, the content was terrible.

Terrible? That’s sounds harsh, but I’m sticking by it. The existing content all felt like it had been created by writers who didn’t have any real experience in having to decide what features to build next. I have extensive experience in creating software, and could easily tell that these were not the work of people who knew of what they wrote.

We wanted to make our content much better than what already existed. Our content would have:

• personality
• strong opinions
• 3 case studies from real-life software products, which we could use to illustrate the main part of the content

We wrote our first article, in which we explained a simple framework anyone could start using immediately.

The article seemed flat; we needed to add something. So we decided to do our case studies already, in hope that we could mine them to add examples to our article.

In conducting our first 3 interviews with founders of software companies, we discovered something surprising: the founders weren’t using any of the prioritisation frameworks we intended to describe in our guide. Instead they wrestled with the problem, giving it much thought and energy, coming up with their own approach. Furthermore this approach changed significantly as their company grew.

Odd. Maybe the whole premise of what we were writing was flawed?

We concluded that this was indeed the case.

We were learning a lot from these interviews. The interviews were far more helpful than our “guide to the frameworks” idea ever would have been.

So now we are doing our own research into how founders and product managers of small, bootstrapped software companies decide what to build next.

And that’s what you’ll find in Kill the HiPPO!