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I use a structured approach to prioritizing features. For each of the features, I analyze the impact, urgency, strategic goal alignment, cost vs effort.

Impact - I evaluate the number of customers or which customer segment  these features would benefit or evaluate if this feature mitigates any existing risks. I will also analyze if the features impact short term or long term goals. For Example - A feature addressing a customer pain point would take a higher precedence over a performance issue if a temporary workaround is available. Although the performance issue fix will benefit in the long term, but it can be deferred to a later sprint.

Urgency - I would evaluate to see if any of the features comes with a

Tight deadline - For ex - PCI Compliance. This would make this feature a higher priority as without a compliant software you can’t exist in the market.

Competitive advantage (Opportunity Cost) - If the feature is critical to getting a competitive edge then this feature should be prioritized higher as sometimes delaying on an opportunity cost has a higher loss.

Strategic Goal Alignment - Evaluate the tasks against the business goals in place like - Revenue growth, retention rate, CSat. If any of the features directly contribute to the goals then they would take higher precedence. There has to be a balance between short term and long term alignment here as well.

Team effort - In collaboration with cross functional teams, the effort to build a feature should be considered. A high reward feature with lower efforts should be prioritized before a low reward, high effort features.

With this approach I build my prioritized list of features for developement.

In my early days as Program Manager, I managed a project for one of our main customers. This project had a very tight schedule and I promised to deliver the first EVT samples in 3 months.

It was my responsibility to ensure everything would be completed on time, and achieve the quality standards defined by the program and inside the budget approved by leadership.

Unfortunately… when I started to deep dive into the project and analyze all the technical details, I realized that it was not possible to get the prototypes ready on time. I missed the deadline by 2 weeks. I felt bad at that time because I failed, so I immediately started to work on a new feasible schedule trying to mitigate the problem. In addition, I arranged a daily opening and closing meeting with the core team to monitor all activities. The root cause of the problem was a delay in some component's delivery and I also ignored one of the Reliability tests defined by Engineering.

So I highlighted the problem to my manager and I shared with him my new plan. I explained the situation to him and I shared the new timeline that I could meet. Then we worked together to commit to the new delivery date. So I learned a lot from that situation, now I’m always adding some buffer to my project schedules and I work more closely with core team members. But the most important learning was, how important is to be honest and raise your hand on time if something goes wrong.

It helps to keep updated with latest technology development whereby enabling faster/ efficient/ better feature / experience delivered to customer. It might even open new opportunity for the company if senior leadership is able to think ahead.

In addition to external learning, it makes sense to keep internal knowledge sharing to avoid multiple work on same feature or leverage existing stacks for faster delivery or learn from others failure.

There are roles for which there is no direct course / education formally done but people need to learn primarily in leadership roles.