How to Prioritise Features for Your First Product Release

Feature debates go in circles when the team hasn't agreed on who the first release is actually for. A product aimed at 'small business owners' invites every feature imaginable, because almost anything could help some small business owner somewhere. A product aimed at 'a bakery owner tracking daily wastage across two outlets' invites a much shorter, sharper list.

Picking one user and one job is not a permanent decision — it is a scoping tool for version one. Later releases can widen the audience or add a second job. But every feature discussion for the first release should be measured against that one user and that one job, not against the eventual vision for the product.

Before scoring features, list the assumptions the whole idea rests on — the things that, if wrong, mean the product doesn't work regardless of how well it's built. For a bakery wastage tracker, one assumption might be 'staff will actually log wastage daily without being reminded'; another might be 'owners will check the numbers often enough to change ordering behaviour based on them.'

Each assumption points to a required user journey. If staff logging behaviour is the riskiest assumption, the journey that lets staff log wastage in under thirty seconds is essential. A detailed reporting dashboard for the owner is not essential to test that particular assumption — a simple daily summary email would test it just as well, at a fraction of the build cost.

For every feature that survives the assumptions exercise, score it on three simple dimensions: how much it would teach you if included, how risky the idea is if it's left out, and how much effort it takes to build. A feature that is cheap, addresses a real risk, and teaches something meaningful is an easy yes. A feature that is expensive, addresses no real risk, and mostly just looks good in a demo is an easy no.

The genuinely hard cases are the ones in between — moderate effort, moderate value. For those, the tie-breaker should be the assumption exercise above: does this feature test one of the assumptions the whole idea depends on, or does it just make an already-working journey nicer? The former earns a place in version one more often than the latter.

One category should never get cut in a prioritisation exercise, regardless of score: whatever keeps the core journey working correctly and keeps user data safe. A wastage-tracking app that occasionally loses a day's entries, or that lets one outlet's staff see another outlet's numbers by mistake, undermines the entire test — the owner will stop trusting the numbers, and the product fails for a reason that has nothing to do with the actual idea being tested.

This means basic input validation, sensible error handling, and correct access permissions belong in version one even though they are invisible to a demo audience and rarely show up on a feature wishlist. They protect the validity of whatever you learn from the release.

The output of this exercise should be two lists, not one: what ships in version one, and what was deliberately excluded and why. Writing the exclusions down — not just the inclusions — does two things. It gives the team a clear answer the next time someone asks 'why doesn't it do X yet', and it creates a starting point for version two that isn't a blank page.

A useful habit is to timestamp the excluded list. When version one's results come in, revisit it with real evidence in hand rather than the original guesswork — some excluded features will turn out to matter a lot, others will turn out not to matter at all, and the difference is exactly what the MVP was built to find out.