Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Extracting Business Value from Feature Requests Posted in User Forums

Introduction

Involving users as active contributors in the product development process rather than as passive participants has been expressed in literature for a long time (Gardiner and Rothwell, 1985; Leonard-Barton, 1995; Rothwell, 1976; von Hippel, 1988; Witell, Lofgren and Gustaffsson, 2011). Collectively users constitute a source of massive amounts of product innovation (Vonn Hippel, Ogawa and de Jong, 2012). When users are viewed merely as recipients of innovation, the firm does not have access to user knowledge and experience developed through product use (Sawhney, Verona and Prandelli, 2005).

Users are co-creator of value (Vargo and Lusch, 2006) and useful partners in the innovation process (Kristensson et al; 2004). Magnusson et al. (2003) found that ordinary users were the best source for new ideas in terms or originality. Through their unique knowledge derived from use of the product ordinary users were better equipped to generate ideas that are relevant to customers than R and D (Research and Development) employees and engineers (Kristensson et al, 2004; Magnusson, 2003).

It has been suggested that the product evolution should be innovative in the users’ frame of mind not the developers’ (Fellows and Hooks, 1998). New product features that do not resonate with the users create wasted development effort, delay in time-to-market, increased complexity and operational costs of the product. Therefore to actively engage users organizations have evolved various mechanisms. Of these the use of websites for capturing and prioritizing user requirements is becoming increasingly prevalent. The websites include both forums and collaborative tools, and are designed to allow large numbers of users to participate in the requirements gathering and analysis process. The success of websites and collaborative tools that have been used to gather inputs from users, demonstrates that, given the opportunity, users too are willing to take the time to contribute feedback and ideas (Laurent and Cleland-Huang, 2009).

However, by actively engaging the users, more new feature requests are often elicited than are needed to build into the system. It is therefore as critical for organizations to identify non-value adding (or marginal value adding) feature requests as it is for identifying feature requests that add value to the users. While on the one hand excluding a high value feature may mean losing users to a competing product, on the other hand including a requirement that is unneeded creates wasted development effort, delays in time-to-market, and increased complexity, maintenance and operational costs of the product. Implementing non-value adding features has negative impacts for both producers and users of software products (Table 1). So how do producers of software products accurately identify from a given set of user feature requests only those features that add significant value to the users of the software product?