Understand your Application’s Feature Set Maturity

As “product people”, we own and nurture software products with the goal of creating value for our customers (users) and achieving business results for the organizations we’re part of.

We need a way to articulate how well-developed (or nascent) the different parts of our application are, make decisions on where to invest time and effort, and layout a roadmap showing the progression of our app. (And once in a while we also need a way to peek at and compare ourselves to the competition). In this post, I’ll suggest a tool to help with these concerns-the concept of “feature set maturity”.

Feature Sets

Feature sets are the main functional building blocks that make up our software. Some of these feature sets are primary or core as they provide the main functionality that makes our applications what they are. Other sets are secondary or peripheral, as they support the core feature sets, but they’re not the main ways our application delivers value.

Let’s look at an example: a typical map application on your phone or PC (e.g. Apple “Maps”). I would consider its core feature set:

• Display a map in different modes (standard or satellite map) with appropriate ways to manipulate the view (zooming, panning, rotating, etc.),