Prioritising by the value of a feature's presence and the cost of its absence

A visual way of showing priorities

Categories help you understand how to strategize about your product, but in terms of prioritising it's still just a list of features with a category attached to it. Sometimes you'll want to make things more visual and telling.

Especially when features are in the same category.

One way of doing so is by using Mike Timko's Cost-Value analysis.

Let's use an example where all features are in the Attract category:

Feature	M	O	A	I
A	2	24	53	21
B	27	20	46	7
C	18	28	38	16

Calculating the value and cost turns this table into:

Feature	Value of presence	Cost of absence
A	0.55	-0.26
B	0.73	-0.47
C	0.56	-0.46

And this can then be easily visualised in a graph:

Reverse features are not part of this calculation. You should re-examine Reverse features to develop a positive counterpart.

Prioritise by cost or value?

If you look at the previous graph, it's pretty clear why feature B is ranked highest: the value of its presence is highest, and the cost of its absence is highest too (albeit with a tiny difference of 0.01 with the feature C). The same applies to feature C: the value of its presence is just a bit higher than feature A's, and the cost of its absence is higher too.

You will however run into analyses where the ranking is not that clear cut. Consider this result:

Feature	M	O	A	I	Value of presence	Cost of absence
A	23	24	32	21	0.55	-0.47
B	5	7	71	17	0.78	-0.12
C	52	28	18	2	0.46	-0.80

Should you prioritise feature B, because its value when present is highest of all three features? Or should you prioritise feature C, because the cost of its absence is higher than that of the other features?

The answer is C. As one researcher (Chen, 2021) puts it:

to ensure customer satisfaction, it is vital to do away with customer dissatisfaction.

Consider the negativity effect; the "notion that even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one's psychological state" (Wikipedia). In other words, not having something weighs heavier than having something. Customers feel worse when they miss something than when that something is available.

The final ranking is therefore:

Use this rule of thumb when sorting features based on their value of presence and cost of absence:

• Feature with the highest cost of absence first;

• When tied: feature with the highest value of presence.