Reach rapid consensus in product planning

huddle     About to work on a challenging new product?
Worried about reaching consensus across the design team?

Designing a winning product is a huge challenge. Current customers want more features, more features and more features. Sales wants something magic that can help them crush the competition. Customer support just wants the current set of features fixed. And everyone wants something right now.

A challenging wish list

If your company is super-organized, you've got a CRM system that gives detailed reports on the varying requests. But if your company is more typical, then there may be great differences in terms of quality or quantity of information. For instance, the customer support team may have a detailed system that tracks the number of requests for new product features. However, the sales team may have just a set of stories from what happened on recent sales calls. Furthermore, the product manager may have additional market intelligence such as product reviews, analyst reports, or competitive analysis.

The first challenge is to integrate these varying sources: to get a full understanding of the market requirements, balancing both qualitative and quantitative information. goodbad

But even if you could reconcile this information, you have a second challenge: limited resources.

moneybag   Wouldn't it be great to develop a product with an unlimited budget, no time pressure, and no vacancies on the engineering staff? Keep dreaming! Even the most successful companies have limited resources. You must prioritize what features should go into the product and when the product will become available. If you're lucky, you might have some control over pricing, staffing and budget. But in any case, you have to make some difficult tradeoffs.

For instance, is it better to include the magic feature for the sales team, or is it better to release the product 4 months late? Or should you add extra engineers so that you can include the magic feature and deliver the product on-time?

Considering these tradeoffs, it may be tough to reach consensus. You want to make an informed decision, but you don't want to get lost in "analysis paralysis". And if it takes a long time to reach a decision, the entire schedule could be affected. With so much work to do, no one wants to sit in meetings any more than necessary.

So the third challenge is to reach rapid consensus on the product plan.

Let's review the challenging wish list for product planning:
  • Integrating qualitative and quantitative information about the market
  • Managing the product requirements with limited staff, time and budget
  • Reaching rapid consensus on the product plan

Why Dwaffler?

Dwaffler can help you quickly prioritize and reach rapid consensus.

There are two key steps to using Dwaffler for product planning:
  • Prioritize the desired criteria for your new product.
  • Rate the proposed product features against the criteria.

About the criteria

The criteria help you judge how well the proposed features support the product requirements. You determine the list of criteria that suit your product - price, size, speed, power, easy-to-learn, etc.

The next step is to determine the importance for each of the criteria. Now, if you try using a simple spreadsheet, you might put scores by each of the criteria: you might say that "low selling price" gets a score of 7, while "does the job in half the time" gets a score of 9. If you start to assign scores, chances are that you'll spend the rest of your planning meeting arguing over whether "low selling price" deserves a score of 7, 8 or 7.45.

thumbs-rating     And here's what makes Dwaffler different: you don't assign arbitrary scores to the criteria. Instead, you simply compare pairs of criteria. For instance, you might determine that "does the job in half the time" is somewhat more important than "low selling price". Dwaffler gives you three simple options: more significant, much more significant, and about the same.

Dwaffler uses these comparisons to determine the overall scores. In addition, Logic Wizard™ can find inconsistent comparisons and suggest several ways to fix major inconsistencies.

To rate the criteria, your team can work as a group or as individuals. If your team works together, you organize a meeting where the group compares each pair of criteria. A trained Dwaffler facilitator can resolve any disagreements through a combination of psychological and analytical techniques. Alternately, each person can prepare a personal set of comparisons; the Dwaffler software can consolidate these into a team score and highlight any areas with strong disagreement.

Evaluating product features

Here's the main goal of product planning: to identify the features that best support the product goals. Using Dwaffler's "numberless" approach, you simply evaluate whether a proposed feature rates "high", "medium" or "low" in terms of each of the criteria. Since you're simply looking for a group of features, you don't waste time splitting hairs over whether a feature rates a 6 or a 7 in terms of some criterion like "helps new customers adopt the product".

Again, to evaluate the product features, your team can work as a group or as individuals. If your team works together, the group evaluates each proposed feature in terms of each of the criteria. This can be part of the meeting to rate the criteria, or it can be a separate meeting. Alternately, each person can evaluate the proposed features; the Dwaffler software can consolidate these into a team score and highlight any areas with strong disagreement.

Once the evaluation is complete, Dwaffler links the features and criteria and rates how well each feature supports the product. You can view a graph for all the features, or compare two features to understand why one gets a higher rating. scrutinize chart


The extras

  • Need to consider risk? Dwaffler can consider risk separately from benefits, so that you can properly evaluate market risks, engineering risks, competitive risks, etc.
  • Need to do cost-benefit analysis? Dwaffler can compute level-of-effort so that you can evaluate whether a complex feature is worth the effort. This can also help identify those simple features that promise a good bang-for-the-buck.
  • Need to evaluate someone's pet feature? Dwaffler can show how it compares to the rest, helping you to explain when it doesn't fit the product goals.

The catch?

  • Is Dwaffler a time-consuming process?  Absolutely not.  Dwaffler customers say that the entire evaluation and review can be done in a matter of hours.
  • Is Dwaffler too complex?  No way.  Most Dwaffler customers aren't engineers who enjoy pushing buttons on the computer.  Dwaffler is designed to be visual, not mathematical.  (Even still, the engineers like Dwaffler, too!)
  • Is Dwaffler affordable?  Definitely.  Dozens of startup and nonprofit organizations have made Dwaffler an integral part of their planning process. (Can you really afford to do product planning without the analytic power of Dwaffler?)

 
See some demos of Dwaffler