Is there a simple method for deciding what feature to work on next? DIE framework to the rescue!

Being an indie and having a small side project, you’ll have have a million things to add/improve. Some things are attractive, some are not, some are nice to have while some of them are real pain in the ass but still needs to be finished. You’re a one man show, nobody will magically take care of that over the night. And ideas keep coming constantly while you actually implement very few of them. You leave the shower with two fresh ideas, in average.

Next step would be to organise a bit, so you put it all together, create a list on paper or digital, whatever. However, after some time you realise it’s not helping because you want to puke every time you take a look at that list. You’re feeling sick after reading first four ideas, some of them being already three months old. But your brain wants to keep a track of every idea, or at least to not forget about it. You’re loosing energy on that, trust me. And now all you have in the head is confusion, not being sure where to start and you end up your day with few tweets, open IDE where you kind of started something and a false feeling that your getting somewhere.

There are dozens of methods for task priorities, what to focus on next. A lot of them are way too much abstract for you, but you realise that too late, using some estimate-on-steroids framework eating up 3h per week. Hopefully this abstraction will scare you away right in the beginning so you won’t even start with it.

I’ve stumbled upon DIE framework to prioritise features. Read it on The Bootstrapped Founder blog from @arvidkahl. It looks pretty simple. Although it won’t solve all of your problems magically, nor it should be taken 100% for strategic decisions, I think it’s pretty much big step in self-organisation. And that’s pretty much important. Getting your ducks in a row, or getting your shit together.

🅳emand (1 high, 3 low)
🅸mpact (1 high, 3 low)
🅴ffort (XS=1, S, M, L XL=5)

Run through your feature list, assign the numbers for each segment to it, sum them up and the lower the score is – the more likely is that you should take that feature to work on next.

I really like it because it’s really simple, there is not much blah blah about it, straight to the point. In 1, 2, 3.

There’s even this DIE feature framework spreadsheet from Baremetrics you can copy for yourself and start doing it today!

If you are a Notion user, I’ve created a formula to calculate DIE score. You can check it out here.

Keep those side projects active ppl🤘