Product Owner decision
A team member suggested a feature for inclusion in the current release of a product. This was not requested by any customer till date, but it could be an exciting addition to the product and be a unique selling proposition. Other team members felt that there were many other pending mandatory features which should be prioritized first. Ultimately, it was left to the Product Owner to determine the priority of the exciter feature. How should the Product Owner decide?
How should the Product Owner decide?
By determining what delivers the most value for the enduser...
What makes a feature mandatory? If it blocks implementation of some other feature, the prio is easy...
How should the Product Owner decide?
If we could answer this for you, what would be the point of a Product Owner?
The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing value, and they should therefore take various inputs into account, such as product fit, conditions in the market, the strategy of their organization, user and customer feedback, problems, and expectations, the perceived development effort, forecast delivery dates, the ability to make more agile decisions in the future, etc.
Maybe you can try to identify some small experiments to run to what the market response would be.
Small enough to not consume too much time and efforts outside of the rest of the PBIs, but enough to form some kind of trigger, or feed information, to see if that new feature could be something potentially interesting to follow up on.
I do like using both the effort and the theoretical business value to address priorities in the backlog.
The PO can for instance use the following quadrant to prioritize the proposed feature.
Ultimately, it was left to the Product Owner to determine the priority of the exciter feature. How should the Product Owner decide?
The Product Owner may order a Product Backlog as he or she sees fit. Why is the Product Owner expected to determine priority at all?