With your product, you always want to exceed customer expectations in a way that will significantly improve their lives-that's what draws them in and keeps them coming back. But it's just as important to make sure that the basic features are working and in place.

There are a lot of ways you can prioritize your feature roadmap. What's crucial is to have a system in place.

Tomer London, co-founder of Gusto, recommends measuring impact and the customer experience (Y-axis) against customer expectations (X-axis):

(source: Gusto)

The way that you weight product initiatives against these axes will depend on your company and your product. But a good general rule of thumb is that a small improvement to a high-impact feature is far more important than a large improvement to a low-impact feature.

It goes back to focus. Focus on the one thing that you can do that will have the highest impact.

1. Focus on the high-impact unexpected features to "Wow!" customers

If you're in the early stages of product development, you need to focus on building "Wow!" features that will have the highest impact, and keep your customers coming back for more. Wow! features are what differentiate your product from all the other ones out there.

For KISSinsights (now Qualaroo), this was giving product managers and marketers the ability to send timed on-site surveys for feedback, at a time when everyone needed more customer feedback to learn and grow. Other products forced users to go to a separate survey landing page, which meant that surveys were interruptive to the experience and were rarely filled out.

2. Focus on "must-have" expected features next

Your "must-have" feature set is often what cements product-market fit after customers have been wowed. These are the features that customers simply expect to have and that most of the competition offers. For cloud-based storage, like Dropbox or Google Drive, the ability to work offline is a good example of a must-have feature.

Tomar London gives the ability to direct deposit payroll into an employee bank account as one of Gusto's "must-have" features. It's something that customers consider absolutely necessary for any payroll system, and assume that relevant companies will have it.

3. Move on to "neat" unexpected low-impact features after product-market fit

Neat features are nice-to-have. They're not incredibly urgent, but, like everything else on your product roadmap, have to be considered carefully.

A good example of a neat feature is Facebook's reactions. The ability to "like" things was a must have. It allowed Facebook to target users with content it knew users would like, based on what they had liked in the past. Facebook users have asked Facebook for a "dislike" option since the beginning of the company and the ability to include a more complex range of emotions.

(source: Wired)

Reactions introduced a new complexity into the mix. The product team at Facebook combed through dozens of reactions. They pulled data from Facebook feeds to see which emojis were most frequently used. They stress-tested each set of reactions through multiple rounds of user-testing
before settling on one for launch.

The lesson here is that there are not small changes to product. If you build a neat feature, make sure to do it right.

4. Focus on removing "who cares" low-impact expected features

Having a single product that does too many things can often be distracting, and what's worse is that it puts you at risk against someone else coming along and doing that thing better. Scrapping features can actually be one of the hardest things to do when building product. The technical complexity can be daunting, and there's always some (if tiny) subset of users who still depend on it.

In 2010, Netflix axed its Friends feature, and phased it out in a succession of web redesigns. The Friends feature was used by less than 2% of subscribers. It was distracting to the product team, and they figured that no one would miss it.

(source: Hacking Netflix)

Unfortunately, it turns out that these 2% subsets of your users also tend to be the most vocal-a lesson that Netflix quickly learned as its blog was ripped into by angry customers.

You'll always have to cut certain features from your product and it will always piss some of your customers off. Just don't try to sweep them under the rug.