Kill the HiPPO

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: Most product management tools already had this type of content on their website; and...

How much can one helpful customer shape your software product with their feedback?A lot - if you let them. To gather material for our book, we've been conducting interviews with software founders. An unexpected result of these interviews? They've helped me better understand my own journey while building Feature Upvote. For example, the story of Simon from Canada reminded me of how much help we received from Ruben from Spain. In our interview with Bridget Harris from YouCanBookMe, she told us...

One of our beta readers is enthusiastic about the concept of Kill the HiPPO: In my opinion, feature prioritisation is much less scientific than some books make us believe. For me it feels much more like playing jazz. There are constraints, sometimes more and sometimes less. Who is building the software, how is the market (enterprise, b2b saas, b2c, ..), the resources at hand, the stage of the company, how mature the product is, etc. Reading interviews and getting inspired by real world...

There's a seemingly popular "framework" for working out which feature to build next, called RICE. RICE was introduced by Sean McBride, while he was a product manager at Intercom. (I write "framework" in quotes, because to my eyes it is a weighted formula, and not an entire framework.) I don't think RICE is very helpful. RICE - and similar "frameworks" - provide an illusion of objective decision-making, while being utterly subjective. Here's a brief explanation of RICE - but it's better to go...

On your feedback board, you've got 3 or 4 popular customer suggestions, each with 100s of votes. And you need to choose which one to build next.How can you choose? 🤔 Here are some criteria you might be use.Which one is easiest to build?Which idea can you build and deliver the soonest? If all else is equal, then this is certainly a simple way to decide.Which one is easiest to maintain?This is quite similar to the previous question, but adds the wisdom of long-term thinking.Which one requires...

Much of the writing on feature prioritisation for software teams describes what happens in large organisations, almost always backed by venture capital. This doesn't reflect what actually happens in small, bootstrapped companies that are not chasing hypergrowth. And yet, there are way more software companies that fit the "bootstrapped, with 20-50 employees" description than fit the "back by venture capital, growing like a rocket ship" category. So we interviewed the smaller, bootstrapped...