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Managing Features

As small products grow and become large ones, the Product Manager will likely find him- or herself bombarded with feature requests from customers, partners, advisors, and from all over the company. Without a way to track individual features, a great idea may get lost in the deluge of data.

One tool I've used to keep track of features over time is a Feature Sandbox. A Feature Sandbox could be as simple as a text document or as complex as a mini-database with a web-based input screen.

I find that a mini-database such as Microsoft Access is handy for sorting and prioritizing features. Once the mini-database becomes large enough, you can easily create and run queries within Access to pull out high priority features for the next release, or features particular to a specific area of a product, or whatever subset of features is of interest to you at any time.

Click here to download a very basic Feature Sandbox (320KB Access file).