13. Wow! I need it: Blending pre-requisites and exciters

• A house without a bathroom is useless. (prerequisite)
• A family needs 3 bedroom house, will not consider 1 bedroom, but 2 or 4 will still do. (the more the better, but more expensive)
• The view from the house is amazing, I want it!(exciter, unique selling point)

Many features are included in product just to excite a customer to initiate a sales process, but are seldom used. Other type of features are absolute must, just to enter the market, and will be used by almost every user.

However, developing and maintaining exciters is expensive. For example, a builder may buy a expensive land to ensure good view from every house, but may lower down the quality of building material to sell it at a market prevailing price. Almost everyone wants to have good landscaping in their neighbourhood, but is seldom willing to pay for it.

This is where segmenting the market becomes important! For sale to high volume, price-conscious market, usability will be more important than view, but for low volume, quality-conscious market, an amazing view will override pricing concerns, and resource allocation for designing and implementing exciters will no longer be an evil expense, but prudent investment.

To capture a larger market segment, most desirable and middle path is to design a must-have feature is such a way that it becomes a exciter for the high-volume, price conscious market, and advances a product's competitive edge.

Exciters that do not satisfy prerequisite or performance needs should be kept to a minimum, but in any case, exciters should be allocated top priority because they are by definition what satisfies the customer and/or market need.

Bottom Line:

1. Innovation: Finding solutions to prerequisite/basic needs so that they become exciters for the market, i.e. sufficiently implemented and high customer satisfaction.
2. Amount of implementation effort must be controlled by limiting the number of exciters that do not satisfy prerequisite need, and not the quality.
   

Looking ahead

There may be possible scenarios, where initial lower quality/implementation detail is acceptable, and can be progressively improved (for example, fuel efficiency of car). Of Course, the better the implementation, the more customer satisfaction there will be, but at the cost of higher investment.

On an average, for every 10% increase in user stories of enterprise level software, system testing time increases by 100%, and deployment times increase by 30%.

lastly, it might be prudent to keep "will not implement" user stories in traceability map, to avoid duplicate user stories in future.

Inspired from here and here