What criteria do you use to prioritize releases?

There are a lot of different ways to prioritize releases - and we're currently updating how we do it right now. If anyone else has any tips, let us know!!

For the most part, we consider two things: business impact and customer impact. For instance, if something has a large customer and business impact, it's prioritized above other items as a tier 1 launch. Or if a launch has a high customer impact but a low business impact it will fall into our T2 bucket as we likely will need to do a lot of promotion into our customer-base to drive awareness, but the launch doesn't necessarily need press coverage or a large outbound push. 

We've found the above model to be quite helpful, although subjective if we don't have the data to back up some of our releases. As mentioned, we are working to refine how we prioritize launches, but it'll likely follow this criteria to some extent. 

Like many marketing organizations, we utilized a tiering structure to determine the priority of product releases as well as level of effort.

In general, I’m always looking to link our impact directly to revenue (new logo or expansion) first and foremost. As a result, for us, “Tier 1” launches will typically contain those products or features we think will really move the needle in terms of generating hand raises from (1) total prospects (i.e., new logos, those who don’t own any of our products at all) or (2) those who are expansion candidates (those who own one of products today but are great candidates for cross-sell on another product in portfolio).

After direct new revenue influence, I obviously am also focused on retention and the extent that adopting a specific feature will help drive up customer satisfaction and retention. If, for example, we have a feature that customers have really been asking for that might not necessarily get a prospect to raise their hand for our products but that would go a long way to keeping our existing customers happy, we want to make sure we do a fair amount of customer marketing and education around that.

Finally, you might have feature releases that are more regional in nature, or only apply to a (smaller) customer segment, or even bug fixes (where you wouldn’t really even want to draw a ton of attention to). For these, we do an appropriate level of customer education and marketing and try to keep things lightweight. In general, we’re releasing a ton constantly across the board, so having a strong framework in place to determine level of effort for each release is critical.

It’s important to note that while you have a general framework, there are of course always exceptions to everything! Sometimes we might have a feature release that we don’t actually think will generate that much net new revenue, but there is something strategic about it (for example, some way it will play with something else we have coming down the line, or it’s part of a larger narrative we are trying to tell) that pushes us to consider a larger splash for it.

We use a tiering system from 1-4, 1 being highest priority and 4 being the lowers.

Criteria we look at to decide the tier of a release includes questions such as:

• Is this a major differentiation or revenue driver?
• Is this a product enhancement or a net new feature?
• Will it be a paid or free product/feature? (does this open up the company to a new revenue stream? And if so, what is the revenue potential? Is it user based or account based?)
• How many people with this feature affect within a given time period?
• Does this impact current customers? If so, how many?
• How important is it for those who require it?
• How many customers (if any) have requested this?
• What is the value vs. risk? (are there implications on other parts of the tool?)
• What is the level of effort?

For this, we weight the scores to calculate an overall "Release Score" with defined score ranges for each tier. We then support accordingly (for example, we wont do a press release for Tier 3-4 and it depends for a Tier 2 release). I can share a scorecard example!

In past lives, my companies have used the RICE Method:

• R: Reachability - how many people will be able to use the feature?
• I: Impact - how much impact will the feature have?
• C: Confidence - how confident are we about the influence?
• E: Effort - how much effort will it take to implement the feature?

Four core criteria that PMMs can use to prioritize releases:

• Positioning: Does this new product or feature help me to redefine my category or position in the market meaningfully?
• Competitiveness: Does this new product or feature help me close a significant gap vs. a core competitor?
• Differentiation: Does this new product or feature help me to differentiate meaningfully vs. competitor(s)?
• Market potential: Does this new product or feature help enter a new, sizable, attractive market (e.g., a new industry vertical)?

A traditional model for tiering launches typically takes the form of a 3-tiered system - PMM and x-functional resources are usually aligned to the launch tier:

Tier 1: most strategic launches that have a meaningful impact on core criteria; typically attract new audiences to product.

• Introduce a new product that helps expand your category (Positioning)
• A new product that enables you to close a significant gap with your competitor (Competitiveness)
• An industry-defining product (Differentiation)
• Enter a new market (Market Potential)

Tier 2: Launches to drive perception or usage of the product, typically with existing users or core audiences.

Tier 3: Improvements to the existing product; with limited potential to impact core criteria meaningfully.