Practical Handbook for Product Developers – First Steps: Idea, Validation, MVP – Prioritizing Features with Stakeholders
Prioritisation isn’t about “least effort”; it’s about highest impact. Here’s why impact-led planning defines a sharp MVP scope — and how to lead stakeholders through it.
Hello, developers! 🚀
Welcome back to the Learn Agile Practices newsletter, your weekly dose of insights to power up your software development journey through Agile Technical Practices and Methodologies!
📚 Previous on this series
⏩ Section 1 - First steps: Idea, Validation, MVP
1️⃣ Chapter 1 – How to Decide What Goes In and What Stays Out of the MVP
2️⃣ Chapter 2 – Simple Solutions First
3️⃣ Chapter 3 – Fake it ‘till You make it
4️⃣ Chapter 4 – Validating the problem/opportunity or the solution? → You’re here.
5️⃣ Chapter 5 – Prioritizing Features (with Stakeholders) → You’re here.
6️⃣ Chapter 6 – Implementing core and nice to have features → Coming next week!
🧭 Follow the journey: each issue is a micro-chapter of the series: Practical Handbook for Product Developers — released weekly.
🔎 Scenario / Pain Point
When building an MVP, countless feature ideas surface: “What about X?”, “Our competitor has Y”, “Let’s add Z now so we don’t rewrite later”. Without clear prioritisation, the backlog becomes a free-for-all, development drags, and the core goal of the MVP — validate the solution — gets buried under feature overload.
Worse: teams equate prioritisation with estimating effort. “This one is 3 days” vs “that one is 10 days”. But the real question is not how long; it’s how much value it delivers. If you spend 10 days on a low-impact feature because it was “easy”, you steal time from high-impact work that validates your hypothesis.
Stakeholders complicate things: marketing wants “delightful features”, product wants “nice to have”, sales demands “dashboard”. Without a structured prioritisation process, every voice becomes equal, and the MVP scope becomes uncontrolled.
When your MVP scope balloons, you risk missing your time box (30–60 days), losing the walking skeleton momentum, and delivering something that is feature-rich but value-poor. The team behind the scenes becomes slow, even though the business expects speed. This mismatch kills early product-developer credibility.
In short: Prioritisation is not optional. It’s the scaffold that lets you keep scope minimal, stay aligned with stakeholders, and focus on solving the right problem — not building everything.
⚡ Why It Matters
Prioritising features with purpose matters because it aligns three critical axes — value, time, and stakeholder trust — and transforms the MVP execution from a tactic into strategic validation:
Impact first, effort second. Frameworks like the Impact/Effort Matrix highlight that value to the user and business should outweigh raw development cost.
Scope clarity equals speed. Prioritisation gives you a concrete IN list and an OUT list. When everyone understands what doesn’t get built — and why — scope discussions vanish and velocity rises.
Stakeholder alignment. Using prioritisation frameworks makes discussions observable and objective. It prevents “my pet feature” wins and forces trade-offs to be explicit.
Validating what matters. You prioritise features that test your hypothesis, not features that fill up your backlog. This focus ensures the MVP remains a learning tool, not just a busy box.
Avoiding the effort trap. Estimations are inherently unreliable early on; relying on them to prioritise is a mistake. A feature may be tagged “low effort” but deliver zero value; or “high effort” yet unlock major learning. Practice shows impact drives outcomes more than effort prediction.
In essence: a well-prioritised backlog is your control panel. Without it, you are blind.
🛠️ How We Solve It
Here are practical steps you can apply to prioritise features with stakeholders — keeping the focus on impact, not development effort.
Set the prioritisation criteria upfront.
Define what “impact” means for the MVP: e.g., number of users adopting the feature, revenue potential in 3 months, reduction of manual work by X%.
Agree on “ease” or “cost” but treat it as context, not decision driver.
Choose a prioritisation framework.
Use Impact/Effort Matrix to visualise features: high-impact low-effort go first.
Use MoSCoW (Must/Should/Could/Won’t) to classify features quickly.
Avoid RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) and any other effort-based approach.
Choose the tool that suits your team’s maturity. The goal: drive alignment and speed, not debate forever.
Lead stakeholder workshops with structure.
Pre-work: send a one-pager describing the MVP goal, core hypothesis, list of candidate features with business/user context.
Workshop format:
For each feature: ask “What problem does this solve?”, “How many users will this impact?”, “How will we know it worked?”
Plot features on Impact/Effort grid live.
Build consensus on the IN list (top quadrant) and the OUT list (low impact or high cost).
Document decisions real-time. Distribute the “IN/OUT” list after the workshop.
Keep “effort” estimates as context, not ranking criteria.
When someone argues “but this takes 2 days vs 10 days”, respond: “Okay – but will it move the metric we care about more than others?”
Highlight that effort is uncertain and shouldn’t delay high-impact work. The feature’s priority is based on impact.
Embed no/low-code and AI tools into the prioritisation conversation.
Highlight features that can be prototyped with no-code (e.g., Carrd, Bubble) or AI (e.g., GPT-4 prototype, Figma-generated UI) as low-investment experiments.
Use these quick prototypes to validate value before coding full solutions. Features that succeed via no-/low-code often get built later in code with stronger evidence.
During workshop: add a column “Prototype possible?” (Y/N). Those yes entries get fast-tracked for learning.
Revisit decisions frequently.
Prioritisation is not once-and-done. As you gather feedback, metrics may change. Use regular check-ins (every sprint or every 2 weeks) to review the IN/OUT list.
⚖️ Trade-offs
Highest impact features may take longer → you delay smaller quick-wins. That’s okay if your hypothesis is big enough and you stay committed to fast feedback.
Quick wins feel cheap but may not validate the core problem → you might build ability to do X but not find whether users care about X.
Low-code prototyping accelerates validation but may mask tech debt → if you commit to no-code without plan to replace, you may carry hidden cost.
Stakeholder consensus helps alignment but risks lowest-common-denominator → keep the criteria strict to avoid “everyone wins” outcomes.
🚀 Next Steps (tomorrow morning)
Draft your feature list: include 8–15 candidate features tied to your MVP hypothesis.
Define “impact” for your product (user metric, cost reduction, activation rate), and rank each feature by that metric — ignore effort for now.
Schedule a 1-hour prioritisation workshop with your key stakeholders: walk through the list, apply an Impact/Effort grid, decide the IN/OUT list. Distribute the results.
📎 Primary Resources
Atlassian – Six Product Prioritisation Frameworks & How to Pick.
Product School – Impact Effort Matrix & How to Use One + Examples.
Optimizely – What is Feature Prioritisation? Five Methods and Examples.
What feature do you and your stakeholders disagree most about — and how confident are you in its impact?
Reply to this email. I’ll pick 2-3 to walk through in the next issue (with crowd feedback).