How Customer Feedback Informed Product Feature Prioritization

A Case Study using MaxDiff Analysis

Bill Brady had a vision that kept him up at night. With his children now teenagers, Bill wanted to create a mobile phone that safeguards children from the filth of today’s social media and the dangers the Internet brings into homes.  

Fast forward a couple of years, and Troomi Wireless was born. Troomi is a kid-safe phone that is more than just a glorified parental-controlled phone. It offers features and solutions that are focused on helping children pursue their dreams.

There was a lot of passion from all participants to nail the perfect solution. Competing priorities of necessary features and capabilities nearly came up regularly during development.

When a product’s features have to do with child safety, it’s easy to see how feature-related decision-making can become an emotional process. Features such as “a dashboard to see usage data and the child’s location,”  “an option in the parent portal to enable or disable email app,” “the ability to whitelist or blacklist certain phone numbers” and 20 or more similar capabilities will elicit strong opinions from anyone involved.

This was the point when Bill turned to the potential customers.

"Even with well-informed assumptions and a very experienced product development team, we wanted to make absolutely sure we were focused on the feature set that would be most appealing to our customer base,” Brady said. “We needed empirical evidence to back up our hunches regarding customer needs currently being unmet by the market, so we determined to figure that out and follow the resulting road map religiously."

And so, Bill turned to market research, and especially a highly accurate research technique used in product feature optimization called MaxDiff. MaxDiff, is a survey-based research approach in which survey respondents are shown a subset of the total list of candidate features. Normally a survey taker sees four or five items and is asked “Please review these product features and select the one that you think is the most critical feature and also select the one that you don’t consider too important.”  See the MaxDiff survey questin for Troomi below: 

When the survey taker makes her selections, a new subset of four-to-five items is shown with the same question: which one is critical and which is non-important? This process is repeated approx. eight times. After hundreds of respondents, the survey-takers’ choices are used to quickly and conveniently set up a ranking of all product features from most to least important.

What are the benefits of MaxDiff? 

There are several advantages of using the MaxDiff product feature prioritization approach:

1. It creates an accurate list from the first to the last item. Normally, if we had simply asked survey takers to look at a long list of items and rank them, people may find the most important item, maybe even the top two-three as well. But the middle of the list would be full of inaccuracies and guesses. MaxDiff breaks it down into small subsets with easy chunks of items to choose from.
2. In a simple ranking exercise, there is not an easy way to measure the magnitude by which a particular product feature was preferred over another one. How much more is Feature A preferred over Feature B? MaxDiff solves that problem, it provides insight on the magnitude by which one feature is preferred over another. That helps product managers make decisions on prioritization. Is Feature A preferred over Feature B by a tiny margin – yet Feature B takes significantly less time to complete? It may be a good idea to start with Feature B.

The results from the MaxDiff exercise were clear: all customer segments (target groups: “High,” “Medium” and “Low”) clearly indicated that two features, “the ability for a parent to enable/disable email app” and “the ability for the parent to enable/disable pictures in group text” were the top needed features.  Customer feedback was unanimous,, and science replaced emotion for the product roadmap.

A Critical Tool in a Product Manager's Toolkit. 

MaxDiff is an increasingly popular market research technique, used ubiquitously across research departments and product teams in leading organizations. Setting up a MaxDiff survey is as easy as A, B, C – and survey platforms, such as Discover by Sawtooth Software make it easy with its drag and drop capabilities.

If you are interested learning more about the ins-and-outs of MaxDiff and want to go a bit deeper into how it works, go ahead and download a free e-book on the Tips and Tricks of MaxDiff, written by Bryan Orme. Bryan is the CEO of Sawtooth Software and is the author of several books on MaxDiff and Conjoint Analysis.