Using Moscow & the Kano method together to make great product decisions!

Using Moscow & the Kano method together to make great product decisions! As a Product Owner, feature prioritization helps with ensuring your stakeholders know what to expect, keeping the peace, and ensuring that you or your team won't get bogged down on the path of overconfidence and overestimations.

Moscow is a simple method to help feature prioritization and an easy acronym for the following 4 prioritization methods;

Must Haves

Think of these as hard requirements, the features or functions that will absolutely be in your sprint.

Should have

Requirements that have an impact on the feature or product you are building, however, the product still can work without these.

Could have

Could have are easily categorized as 'Nice to have, they are the type of features that are the icing on the top and often added to the product backlog rather than the sprint backlog.

Won't have

Think of this as what the product or feature set won't do, in this particular cycle or sprint.

Where do I start?

Using the Kano method helped me with organizing feature prioritization when and only if I had the legroom to do so, by legroom I mean a mature team that can provide strong inputs.

The Kano method was invented by Dr. Noriaki Kano in 1984, professor of quality management at the Tokyo University of Science, the method when explained for the first time, smacks you on how simple it really is, the method looks at both customer satisfaction on one side of a metric and the product function on the other side.

How do I use it?

Categorizing features sets, to provide real value is an art form, as a Product Owner, there is so much going on, with people, teams, and structures and it's our job to ensure that the maximum value of feature sets is evaluated for competing in the market.

I have always found it brilliant to use this framework to determine my product roadmap. It helped me with assessing the weight of the stories that would go into the sprint. Making sure I always question what will bring the organization I was working for value and what type of value it was providing.

I've always thought that customer satisfaction is linear, it can start and end at any point of the spectrum and that spectrum will require constant evaluation and monitoring of the satisfaction demands that the product addresses.

There are several levels of customer satisfaction and we are all known to be akin to them, as customers ourselves, we all know that when we buy a new car, we're looking for some typical things, that are considered basic features and then there's the performance type of features in a new vehicle and the exciting stuff. Let's say we're building a new vehicle, power steering is considered a basic feature nowadays, but back when it was a point of innovation, it was an exciting product feature for the automotive industry, seat warmers in colder climate countries are often considered as basic features too, or the button that helps you un-fog your windows from the cold or humidity, the exciters could be things like, automated reverse parking and so on, and the performer features are the things that would bring the company value, I would call this anything to do with saving money in the long run that addresses fuel consumption and so on.

In software, much like building out a new vehicle and taking it to market, as Product Owners, it is our job to always be asking the questions of what type of value does this feature create, how does it bring my company more value, how does it compete in the market with other products and how does it excite the customer.

As Product Owners, we must look at our work as a continuous loop of growth, through feedback, testings, and priorities we can achieve a product that is constantly competing with the market trends.

Here is my explanation of the Kano method applied;

Kano Customer Satisfaction axis

Let's take a look at the y-axis, and identify these points as happy and sad faces. This is our measurement.

Kano's Functionality axis

Now, let's look at the intersection, x-axis our functionality scale, this can also be called as 'Investment, sophistication or implementation' and it represents how much of a given feature the customer gets, how well it is implemented or what level of investment goes into the product development or feature set.

What do these mean?

Kano applied, classifies the features into 4 categories depending on how customers react to the given functionality; they are performance,

Performers

These are performance-based features, for example, when you are looking to buy a new call the number of liters the petrol tank has, is a performance feature another simple example to remember is when buying a new phone the battery life of the phone is what customers may compare one product vs the other, to increase greater customer satisfaction.

Exciters

I like to call exciters that provide the 'Wow factor in a product, exciters provide customers with a positive reaction, that hits the sweet spots of attractiveness and delights the customer.

Think of the iPhone, when it was first released the seamless experience of the touchscreen is an exciting feature or a luxury vehicle that can reverse self-park automatically.

Basics

Product features are simply expected by the customer, if the product doesn't have them it would seem incomplete. For example, a smartphone that doesn't have Bluetooth, customers would expect that Bluetooth is a standard feature in almost every type of smartphone and they won't be satisfied if they didn't get the basic set of features.

Indifferent

Typical indifferent a feature that if we had included it in the product build doesn't make a real difference to the level of satisfaction a customer has and doesn't affect their reaction to the product.

In practice, applying Moscow along with Kano helps me listen to my stakeholders on what features the business needs, it provides me the ability to be objective in managing the expectations of my customers and provide a competitive edge. Doing so decreases unproductive time spent on things that just don't make an impact. So the key here is to remember to listen for the 'strategic input', the strategic goal, and how that aligns to a tactic of interaction with the user, once that is established and the strategy is clear for you, both Moscow and Kano together works like a gem.

How do I apply it?

Here is my example, I've taken a made-up vehicle by Toyota, it's a 4x4 offroad, I've included what we know as basic features (the model before) or the features known already to consumers that were developed by competitors and included the performers and exciters.

I've categorized this into buckets, then planed it into my Sprint below using Moscow and kept checkmarks of Kano to indicate that the feature belongs to a performer item or an exciter item, now of course we have to be mindful that sometimes some features need to finish or start because of another, but you get the point of how you can simply talk to your stakeholders and explain your method of priorities by doing so using the below example.

If there is a specific example of a problem, you'd like me to write about please get in touch with me and fill in the form explaining your key problem and prioritization, I'll do my best to assure a case study on it.

By Sarah Huang, Consultant