Why is product features important

Every product contains these components to a greater or lesser extent, and they are what the consumer uses when evaluating alternatives. The importance of each aspect of the tangible product will vary across products, situations, and individuals. Every product is backed up by a host of supporting services. The augmented product includes the tangible product and all of the services that support it.

Often, the buyer expects these services and would reject the tangible product if they were not available. For example, if you shop at a department store, you are likely focused on a core and tangible product that centers on the merchandise, but you will still expect the store to have restrooms, escalators, and elevators. Dow Chemical has earned a reputation as a company that will bend over backward in order to service an account.

It means that a Dow sales representative will visit a troubled farmer after hours in order to solve a serious problem. This extra service is an integral part of the augmented product and a key to their success. When the tangible product is a service, there is still an augmented product that includes support services.

Westin hotels offer hotel nights with a specific set of features as their tangible product. The augmented product also includes dry cleaning services, concierge services, and shuttle services, among others. In a world with many strong competitors and few unique products, the augmented product is gaining ground, since it creates additional opportunities to differentiate the product from competitive offerings.

The outer ring of the product is referred to as the promised product. Every product has an implied promise, which is a characteristic that is attached to the product over time. The promised product is the long-term result that the customer hopes to achieve by selecting the product.

The promised product may be financial—the resale value of a car, home, or property, for example—but it is often more aspirational. The customer hopes to be healthier, happier, more productive, more successful, or enjoy greater status. According to Food Marketing Institute, the average U. By incorporating some pivotal package design features, your brand can remain competitive and increase customer satisfaction through beautiful, functional and high-quality packaging.

What are the purposes of packaging? Packaging serves a practical role, but it can extend further. Product packaging can leave a lasting impression on your customer, so having the right features can improve brand loyalty. Why is packaging important for a product?

The primary reason is that it protects the product from spoiling, contamination, breaking or loss of any kind, ensuring the customer receives the best version of the product. Depending on the product, your packaging may need one or more forms of protection to keep it secured and intact. For food packaging, the product requires a freshness seal to preserve its shelf life.

Beverage products should also have protective features like a freshness seal, indicating if someone has opened the bottle or container. Likewise, childproof packaging has also been a revolutionary safety measure that parents appreciate. Another solution for protecting products, particularly food and supplements, is using desiccant packs.

Filled with silica gel or bentonite clay, desiccant packs help control humidity by absorbing moisture. One of the chief packaging benefits for consumers is the information architecture displayed on the package. Information architecture refers to the hierarchy of facts presented to the consumer via the packaging. The average consumer makes an estimated 35, decisions each day. A study published in the journal Judgment and Decision-Making found that participants could compare values and make choices in a third of a second.

Product packaging should provide a positive customer experience. Busy shoppers appreciate when brands prominently feature valuable information because it saves them time and mental effort. Considerate packaging design informs consumers how to correctly use the product for best results.

The table below details the most common usage for these terms. Depending on the development methodology your team uses, the terms may have slightly different meanings. A group of related features or user stories that share common business objectives. As larger bundles of work, epics tend to span multiple releases. A product feature described from the perspective of the end-user. The user story format is helpful in relating features to benefits. As a [type of user], I want to [action] so that [benefit].

A defined capability that needs to be completed in order to deliver a feature. A single feature may have multiple requirements. How do features, user stories, requirements, and epics work together? Let's look at an example from a fictitious cycling application. In the screenshot below, our epic is related to "Rider reporting" — this is a group of capabilities that will enhance the rider's ability to report on their performance.

This is a broad scope of work that needs to be broken down into multiple features or user stories, like "Bike mileage tracking" shown here. This single feature then contains multiple requirements, including the design of the mileage report and integrating with an existing analytics engine.

Requirements, features, user stories, and epics go together — but you can choose the best structure based on your product or service. Your team may have a preference based on the development framework your engineering team follows.

For example, most agile teams eschew requirements for high-level user stories. If your product is very complex or your industry is heavily regulated, you may need to have detailed requirements to be sure you have captured what is needed in a precise way.

Either way, keep customer needs at the forefront of feature definition. You likely have a lot of ideas and requests to review, along with a backlog of needed enhancements. A prioritization process is essential to determining what you will build next, and so is the task of clearly defining features. This makes it easier to gain alignment around what a feature will entail and to send the right information to your engineering team when it is time. To offer maximum value, product features must be prioritized effectively.

Product features should also be prioritized based on how well they achieve business objectives. With so many stakeholders involved in one product release, it can be challenging to know where you should begin.

Efficient feature management takes skill even in single-product or single-target-market companies. But in more complex organizations, it takes real expertise. Start with goals As a great product manager, you must establish a "goal first" approach for your product. The product team agrees on strategic initiatives first, then aligns the roadmap and requirements against them.

A goal-first approach will keep everyone on the same page. Rank based on business value Quantify the value of features against metrics that matter to your business. Then, rank these features based on those scores. Use a simple "effort" scale to rank these features based on projected maximum return. Doing so will help you confirm how much each feature will cost in terms of resources.

This is not the official effort estimate, but it will give you a sense of what it will take for you to consider regarding your roadmap planning. Competing interests may incite debate over which features should be added to a product. Even on great teams where consensus and trust come easy, someone must make the final call when there are real reasons for disagreement. Product managers have to make tough decisions and lead with conviction.

If you do not take action to resolve these disagreements, the indecision will be pushed into engineering. They will either start building what they think is right or thrash and simply stall out. To begin your feature definition process , start by picturing your product's end user. Which problems keep them up at night? What's standing in their path to success? How will your product help them excel at what they do and be happy doing it? To answer these questions, it helps to create buyer personas.

Mapping personas to the features you add can help ensure that all features deliver value against your target market. Collaborate cross-functionally to answer the following questions:. User story mapping is another way to define how features might meet customer needs. User story maps are a visual representation of the customer journey.

You can quickly organize and define features from the perspective of each interaction that a user has with your product. Below is an example of an interactive user story map created in Aha! Now that you have evaluated a feature's business value and answered critical questions about your customers, you are ready to define your feature in more detail.

You may want to create a wireframe to provide a quick sketch of the desired user experience for a given feature. Then, work with the UX team to deliver a mockup , or visual design, of what the feature will look like.

All this work is grounded in giving the engineering team clarity about what is needed — so that they can implement a brilliant solution. Define and prioritize features that will bring the most joy to your customers and the most value to the business. From here, you can work with engineering to move features that are high-priority into upcoming releases for development. Product management Release management Feature prioritization. What are product features?