How to filter user feedback and decide what to build?

I'm sure you've moved into a flat at some point in your life.

There is a ton of stuff to consider beforehand; buying a fridge, making sure the bed fits your room, activating the electricity and so on...

All these are fundamental pieces that you need to be able to live in your flat.

If you rush yourself to buy any-and-every-thing, you'll soon realise that you don't need all that stuff! Like that IKEA milk foamer?

You first need to live there to understand what is missing; if existed, your life would be easier.

The same logic applies to building a lean digital product! There is many nice-to-have features you can develop (e.g. it'd be nice to add green color here)

Key is to differentiate nice-to-have features from must-haves if you want to build a lean product.

At Scrintal, we follow these 3 steps to prioritise what to build next:

#1: Ask qualitative questions to understand the problem

When someone wants to have a specific feature, we ask what is the underlying problem that they are trying to solve? If you know the real problem, the solution might be different and more effective than what the person thinks.

Perhaps dark mode is not a key factor in making some choose your tool over another one.

#2: Do others want the same thing?

We've kept Scrintal v.1 simple and lean. You can create Zettelkasten cards on an infinite canvas, write on them and connect.

90% of our users said they'd like to add images to cards because they work visually. So if we wanted Scrintal to serve their workflow, implementing this feature became a no-brainer. More urgent than the dark mode :)

#3: Decide together as a team

This is inspired by Micheal Siebel's video on how to build a product as a small startup.

We categorise all the feedback together as a team. Everyone voices their suggestion. We discuss why we think a feature set is more important than the other that requires prioritisation. We decide together what to build next. So everyones' voice is heard!

If you find this helpful, you can learn similar actionable insights on our blog and Twitter.

Have a clear filtering mechanism! Always question if that ONE Thing will make your life easier by solving a problem.