1. Consider your product’s vision and whether it aligns with the feature request.

As you’re prioritizing features, keep in mind that the vision of your product is an essential component of your product strategy. Your vision statement should be clear and concise. It should clearly describe what it is you want to achieve with your product or service, and why.

You can use this information to help inform decisions about which feature requests are more important than others—which ones will help achieve your company's goal? If a request doesn't align with the company's goals or vision, then it's not likely something that should make its way onto the roadmap.

2. Assess the customer demand for the feature request.

How much customer demand is there for the feature request?

Customer demand is important because it shows how many people want a feature, and how useful it would be. High-demand features are more likely to be prioritized than low-demand ones. Some companies use surveys, while others ask customers directly through their product forums or social media channels. If you don't have access to any of these methods, try thinking about why someone might request this feature—is it something they need? Is it something they think would help them achieve their goals with your product? Or do they just think that adding something new would be fun? These questions can help determine whether there is enough customer interest in making the change happen sooner rather than later.

3. Look at competitor products that have similar features to the one being requested.

To prioritize your product roadmap, look at competitor products that have similar features to the one being requested. Consider the following questions:

How does this feature position us competitively?

Is it a popular feature among our current and potential customers?

Is this something people are asking for from other products in the market?

Often you can find answers to these questions in app stores, forums, and review sites.

4. Judge whether the feature adds value to your product or if it would be redundant.

First and foremost, you need to consider the value of a feature for your customers. How will it improve their experience? Is there a gap in their current capabilities that this feature can fill? If so, then maybe it’s worth pursuing.

If you think that this new feature would add value to your product but doesn’t seem like something customers would be excited about—that is also worth considering. Perhaps you could add another layer of functionality or make it easier to use than similar features in other products on the market.

You should also take into account how adding this new capability would impact other parts of your business: would it free up resources within your company? Or perhaps by developing this new capability, you can position yourself as an industry leader in some way? This may not always be entirely measurable (aside from increased customer retention), but if there are any tangible benefits associated with implementing the new project, they should be included as part of its total value proposition.

5. Consider the long-term costs and complexities of adding a feature.

At first glance, a new feature may sound like a great idea and addition to your product and it may still be. But before you take the leap on a feature, think through and discuss with your software developers about the long-term costs and complexities that are inherited with this feature.

Every new feature will make your product a little more complex both from a user perspective, but also from a developer perspective. Overcome the tendency to just add features, consider what features that you can subtract.

There are many ways to evaluate feature requests, but you should always weigh them against your company’s goals and overall roadmap.

There are many ways to evaluate feature requests, but you should always weigh them against your company’s goals and overall roadmap. For example, if a customer suggests a feature that will help them in their current situation, but it doesn’t align with the product vision or strategic goals of your company, it might not be worth prioritizing at this time. In this case, it might be better for you to let the customer know along with an alternative solution.

At the end of the day, it is up to you as a product manager (and team) to make these decisions based on what is best for your product and customers/users.

There are many ways to evaluate feature requests, but you should always weigh them against your company’s goals and overall roadmap. For example, if a customer suggests a feature that will help them in their current situation, but it doesn’t align with the product vision or strategic goals of your company, it might not be worth prioritizing at this time.

5 tips when prioritizing feature requests

A good product name is one that is easy to remember and is associated with the product's brand. It should be short, catchy, and unique. A good product name can help to make a product more successful by helping it to stand out from the competition.

However, it can be hard to come up with a product name that is short, catchy, and unique. In the post, I will show you how to use OpenAI API to brainstorm and generate product names.

For example, I generated Tunebeasts, Songbirds, and Tonehounds for a music editor using the methods in this post.

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and deployment for-profit company. They describe their mission like this:

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. An important part of this effort is training AI systems to do what humans want.

OpenAI's API is a collection of natural language tasks that can be used to train models to perform various tasks such as sentiment analysis, text generation, and question answering. The API is designed to be easy to use and easy to extend, making it a great tool for developers who want to build their own natural language models.

Don’t worry if all this sounds complicated - it is not more complicated than writing a paragraph in Google Docs.

How do I use this to generate product names?

We will write a prompt that will tell the AI what it should do, the AI will follow the instructions and return the results for us. All this is very easy to do using the OpenAI Playground.

To be able to follow along with this guide, you will need an 

 to access the Playground but if you only want to read along that is also fine.

. Here you will be prompted with what looks like a text editor. This is where we give the AI instructions on what it should do.

The task we want the AI to perform is to generate a great product name for us. So let’s write the following instruction for the AI:

Now if you click submit, you should get back a product name generated by the AI as in the screenshot above.

As you can see from the screenshot, the generated name that I received was “MySoftware” which is not bad but not quite right. To improve we can make our instruction more specific by being more specific.

Let us pretend that our software product is a customer feedback tool. Edit our instructions to the following:

When I ran this, I got a slightly better results. 

We can further improve by being more specific and providing examples in our instructions.

As you can see now we have a much more detailed prompt and the results are definitely better.

That's amazing. The results vary wildly, so you may need to run it a few times to generate great names.

There are a lot of settings that you can adjust in the sidebar, but the most important one for us is the temperature. This setting controls how much randomness the AI will use. A temperature of 0 means that the results will be deterministic and repetitive, while a temperature of 1 will generate more diverse results.

For creative tasks, it is recommended to set the temperature to 0.9. Play around with 

If you are looking for a word that is related to an animal trait you can ask for that as well, check this out. Again, it makes sense to give a few examples so the AI knows what you are looking for.

Be creative and play around with the prompt design. Now it is your turn. Good luck!

Letters used to invent new catchy product names

It can be hard to come up with a product name that is short, catchy, and unique. In the post, I will show you how to use OpenAI API to brainstorm and generate product names.

How to generate product names using Open AI

Looking for a Google Sheets template to manage your product roadmap? Get our free template. Google Sheets is a great tool to build and share your roadmap with your team.

Get the template here!

1. Open the template & download a copy (File / Make a copy)

2. Manage your features and their status on the Features tab.

Enter your feature in the Feature column.

Set the status of the feature in the status drop-down to show it on the roadmap: Planned, In Progress, Complete, or Under Review. Features with status set to Open are not shown on the Roadmap.

Add any optional information that you want to track such as Effort, Details, etc.

3. View your roadmap on the Roadmap tab. The Roadmap is generated from the Features tab. Don't make edits on the Roadmap tab.

Note: If you want to customize the statuses, update the text in the "Status input" fields on the Features tab (update the status manually for existing features).

I hope you find this template useful. If you decide to upgrade from Google Sheets, you should 

 (we have a free plan to get you started). 

If you're planning to share your roadmap publicly, there are better tools than Google Sheets. With Convas, you will have a roadmap page that you can share publicly. Here's our own 

tools and examples to build a public product roadmap

Looking for a Google Sheets template to manage your product roadmap? Get our free template. 

Back to Blog.

Product roadmap template - Google Sheets