Kano Model in Backlog Prioritization
As Product Managers, it’s always important to bring new features to life. In the era of rapid development with booming in the industry, especially in online business, product development and new features became more crucial than before to survive the competition.
While that’s the case, one question always comes to mind. How to prioritize these things?
Several things are coming from all sides, stakeholders’ requests, board requests, technical improvements, competitors’ analysis, etc. In the world of 100s of backlog issues, it’s sometimes difficult to prioritize and take the right thing inside the box.
Kano Model is one of the models that help to prioritize backlog items. It’s the way of understanding the potential impacts from business, product, and technical perspectives.
It’s a kind of simple model, that shows the way of understanding the features’ functionalities. Let’s say, you are going to buy a new phone. The phone you are going to buy should make simple voice calls (since that’s the fundamental function) but it’d be nice if it has also AI-voice-assistant. You’ll be delighted with that one specific feature.
Before starting more explanations about the model, let’s note that: Kano Model was first introduced by Dr. Noriaki Kano, a Quality Management Professor at the Tokyo University of Science.
Kano model has 5 feature types, which are ;
Basics
The features of the basics and fundamentals of the product fall under this category. They are the simplest things that customers expect when they use your product.
Example: If you use the e-commerce marketplace platform, you’d expect to zipping around different categories, browse products with respective prices and add them to cart.
Performance
Performance features or some called, satisfiers are the features that will increase customer happiness and satisfaction, however, are not totally necessary.
Example: If you use the e-commerce marketplace platform, most probably you are okay to pay the delivery fee since there is a logistics that will provide your service. It’d be great if the platform / mobile app has free delivery for your purchase, which will make you happy and you dislike the app if you don’t have one.
Excitement
Excitement features or so-called delighters are the things that customers are not aware of that, they want these features. Always a better thing to surprise customers with a few features, right? :)
Example: If you use the e-commerce marketplace platform and you see the cross-sell recommendations or reminders about your last visit, you’ll most probably be pleased by these actions. Or if the app remembers your credentials and let you remember the last things that you make on the app to easier your life, it’d be great, isn’t it?
Indifferent Features
Simply, these features are the things that customers are not care about at all.
Reverse Features
These features are the features that customers will dislike them and won’t be happy about them.
Example : Adding delivery fee for all purchases, even if they are so high costed.
The above graph shows us how to evaluate the features. Kano model mainly focus on two things;
1- How much our users will be delightful with that feature? What is the potential impact on customer happiness?
2- What is the implementation / technical cost of this feature? The cost to invest for implementation / development?
Even it’s a good model to understand impact on customer vs. potential investment for implementation, it requires quiet knowledge on customers and the area to served. It’s important to understand users and their potential actions clearly and in a right way.
However, it also prevents before hand to develop wasted features from the eyes of customers.
