"What should I build next?" – all PMs everywhere
The user impact score is an auto-calculated score that can help you surface your top-requested feature ideas.
It represents the number of people who've requested a feature (or expressed a need that would be solved by it), weighted by how important it is to them.
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Adding the user impact score to your boards
Once the user impact score is added to your Features board, you can arrange your features as a sorted list based on their score. We recommend adding the user impact score to your Backlog and Prioritization boards and roadmaps. Adding the user impact score to the roadmap helps you to foster customer centricity and transparency.
To add the user impact score to your Features board use the Add Column button:
- Select Default fields and toggle on the User impact score.
To add the user impact score to your Roadmap:
- Click the
Configure button in the top right of the roadmap.
- Toggle on User Impact Score.
You can also use the user impact score column filter to show just the most pressing feature ideas or those that at least one of us has requested with a given importance value, or across a given time period.
Filtering with the user impact score is a great way to prepare for upcoming calls with customers. You can filter your features board by Company and by the most relevant features to them, which is a great way to foster customer centricity and transparency.
Scoring the importance of insights
Once you've highlighted a new user insight and linked it to a related feature idea, it's up to you to indicate how important it is to the user. Whether the insight represents a feature request, a pain point, or an opportunity uncovered during user research, the precise significance of this value may vary. However the setting of the importance of each insight will ultimately help you surface the most impactful feature ideas, so it's a worthwhile investment toward facilitating prioritization later.
When you highlight and link a user insight to a related feature idea, that will automatically increment that feature's user impact score by +1.
You can also specify the importance of the feature to the user, which has implications on how many points are added to the user impact score.
The user impact score increases according to the following scale:
- Not important (+0 points)
- Nice-to-have (+1 point)
- Important (+2 points)
- Critical (+3 points)
Suggested guidelines
For consistency, it's recommended that you norm on a set of scoring guidelines with your teammates, such as the following:
- +1 importance score: By default, use +1 Nice to have. This adds a point to the linked feature's user impact score. In many cases, users reach out with cool ideas that would be nice to have but won't make or break their experience with your product.
- +2 importance score: For features that could represent a major opportunity or solve a significant pain-point that significantly alters how much value users can get from your product, use +2 Important.
- +3 importance score: Reserve +3 critical for those features whose absence is likely to lead directly to churn or lost deals.
Occasionally, +0 Not important can be helpful as well. An example would be if you've polled all the members of your customer advisory board on how much value a feature would generate for them, and someone has said the feature would not be valuable at all. This way, you can capture this information without positively influencing the feature's user impact score.
Highlighted insights linked to a feature without an importance specified increment the feature's user impact score by +1 by default.
Note that if the same user provides feedback on the same feature multiple times, their feedback will only count toward the score once. Likewise, if the importance of the feature changes for them over time, the most recent importance value set in the app will be used.
Limitation: When a user sets an importance value via Portal or Slack, it is applied if no previous importance for a given user exists. As such, you cannot update importance via Portal and Slack, only create new value if none exists for the user yet.
school Productboard Academy Quick Tip Video
What’s the difference between a note and an insight? How do I create insights? What do I get out of it? This video shows you how to connect feedback to features and create better products based on user needs.
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