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project-management requirements software-as-a-service product-management

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July 26, 2025 Score: 3 Rep: 82,371 Quality: Expert Completeness: 70%

None of these methods is limited to "technical value". In fact, very often "business value" is considered, be it business value for the users (e.g. enabling higher productivity) or for the software producer (e.g. less calls to the helpdesk, less loss of customers going for better products). So Moscow, Rice etc should work if the business value related to user's emotion is taken into account.

In this sense, a feature expected by many users and for a long time should go a least to ShouldHave (Moscow) and would have a high reach (Rice).

But I understand that it's not that easy:

  • It's not obvious to quantify the business value associated to users dissatisfaction, that has moreover a cumulative effect;
  • It is not easy to objectively assess if it's still really dissatisfaction or if the users got used to work without and have found efficient workarounds (if it was awaited for a long time).

More generally, even if we address well the prioritization (e.g. feature upgraded to ShouldHave or even MustVave), we may still face the traditional scheduling issue of starvation when there are many feature requests: there may always be a features of comparable priority that are deemed more important and use all the resources available in the current cycle.

If you are confronted with this, you may fine tune your prioritization process to consider within the same priority class a booster for a limited number of very small cost items:

  • the pro: it's sometimes quicker to implement such a feature than to discuss again and again why it should or not be included in the current sprint;
  • the cons: the risk is that too many low cost changes might be boosted and end up consuming resources, delaying significantly bigger items (not to speak of the sometimes underestimated interdependencies that make the small change a little more tedious than initially expected, see also Hofstader's law). This is why it is important to limit the number of boosted small changes (a few per sprint would not significantly impact the overall outcome).
July 28, 2025 Score: 1 Rep: 84,846 Quality: Medium Completeness: 30%

The cost of this type of "customisation request" isn't so much in the work required to implement, but the on going support of the customisations over time.

Your product can soon evolve into something where 90% of your dev effort is in tweaking, adding and maintaining the various customers individual custom features. This can be expensive and at some point they will switch to a competing product which offers those features "out of the box" and promises "user controlled customisation" with zero cost and immediate effect. (Whether that's true in practice or not)

What you should consider with these requests is not so much the benefit for the individual customer making the request, although this may be the priority early on when you have one or two main customers, but on the features offered by your competitors.

You want to make the product that people want to switch to. Not the one they are tied to but hate.

So prioritise the features your competitors offer and implement them in a way that exceeds that offer, while keeping the maintenance cost lower.

Rather than constantly adding piecemeal customisation to v1, consider making a v2 you can upsell to your current and new customers

July 28, 2025 Score: 1 Rep: 41 Quality: Low Completeness: 20%

At UnifyBoard™, we’ve learned that the real challenge with small but highly requested features isn’t their complexity — it’s how they’re perceived and prioritized. These features often have low technical cost but high emotional impact on users. Ignoring them for too long weakens trust, even if the product remains technically solid.

To manage this, we reserve a small portion of each sprint (around 5–10%) for “quick wins” — features that users repeatedly request and that enhance user experience or reduce support friction. We also factor in user frustration and churn signals into our prioritization framework, treating “emotional ROI” as part of the overall impact.

Whether in B2B or B2C, these small but thoughtful features can set your product apart – not just through functionally, but by building trust and reputation.

Thanks to everyone who shared insights and frameworks — they helped us reflect and refine our approach.