How to Prioritize Product Requirements: A User‑Centric Approach and Bug‑First Strategy

When developing a product, we face a never‑ending stream of demands: external user feedback, internal team ideas, bugs, and new feature requests.

It may seem that implementing every request will make the product better, attract more users, generate more revenue, and enable us to hire more people to handle even more requests. In reality, demands keep coming and it is impossible to clear them all; 996 work will never finish.

The practical solution is to continuously rank the demands and implement the highest‑priority ones. The key question is: How should we rank the requirements?

Prioritizing with the User at the Core

Steve Jobs once said:

People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

Do users really not know what they want? Often they do. As a product manager I talk with users every day; they can tell us exactly which features they need, sometimes even providing simple UI designs, algorithm ideas, or open‑source code.

However, users are only the product’s consumers. Their understanding of the product is shallower than ours, so their requests may deviate from the real problem. We must analyse and dig deeper.

We are not visionaries who can create demand, nor are we the likes of Zhang Xiaolong with a hundred‑million‑user base. Therefore, we should communicate more with users and set priorities based on their needs:

When users give feedback or complaints, listen patiently, engage deeper, and record everything.

When fixing bugs, optimizing or adding features, proactively contact interested users for additional feedback.

Conduct regular user research to hear the silent majority.

Rank user‑submitted requests by the number of supporters, impact scope, and difficulty.

While we are often excited by new ideas, we must restrain our creative urge and respect user opinions. The product is for customers, not for our own amusement.

In an era where traffic dividends have dried up, acquiring a new user is far harder than retaining an existing one. Therefore, improving retention is crucial. Valuing every user feedback, fixing reported bugs promptly, and prioritising the features users actually want are the most effective ways to boost retention.

Bug Priority Is Higher Than New Features

Murphy’s Law states:

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Every programmer knows that code can never be completely bug‑free; often we simply haven’t discovered the bugs yet, or we know about them but haven’t fixed them in time.

Product bugs are easily overlooked: they may be hidden deep, users may not report them, or we may turn a blind eye, thinking the issue is minor.

In reality, users have strict quality expectations and will notice even tiny problems. Without monitoring, we might discover bugs very late.

Sometimes users report a bug that seems impossible. We may instinctively blame the user’s environment, but that is just avoidance. Code execution is deterministic; if something behaves oddly, it is almost certainly a bug. Below is an anecdote from our team:

A user reported occasional invitation failures when adding team members.

Monitoring data confirmed rare failures affecting a few users.

We inspected the front‑end and back‑end code and found nothing wrong.

We assumed the business code was fine and dismissed the issue.

More users reported the same problem, with increasing error messages, forcing us to investigate.

Further checks showed that the line and column numbers in the error logs were offset, which was strange.

We discovered that the production environment was still running an old version of the code.

Finally, we found a misconfigured Docker deployment file that caused a node to run outdated back‑end code.

This pattern—pressing forward while ignoring existing problems—mirrors many aspects of our lives.

For product bugs, we should fix them immediately or set a clear deadline, while allowing new features to be delayed.

If we keep building new features while ignoring existing bugs, we lose the purpose of the original work and risk alienating users.

Conclusion

Requirement management is an art that involves many trade‑offs. Here is a simple priority order for reference:

User‑reported bugs

Self‑discovered bugs

User‑requested features

Self‑proposed features

Strictly following this order is impossible; it merely provides two dimensions for thinking. In practice, you also need to consider each demand’s impact scope, urgency, and difficulty.

Do you have better ideas? Feel free to comment! The article is authored by Fundebug’s Technical Director.