Premium value in a SaaS product refers to the unique set of features and benefits that distinguish it from other products features that justify a higher price point. These premium features can include enhanced security, advanced analytics, integrations with other platforms etc.
Premium value is typically designed to appeal to high-value customers that provides sufficient value for customers who are willing to pay more.
To discover premium values, the most obvious choice is to start asking users through surveys. Surveying customers with the list of features and having them choose the most and least useful features will help rank the valuable feature a product can focus on. Here’s a framework that can help evaluate the premium value features.
Maximum Difference Scaling (MaxDiff)
MaxDiff scaling is a technique in market research to determine the most important features of a product. This technique allows businesses to understand the relative importance of different features and prioritise accordingly. MaxDiff involves 3 steps,
- Create feature sets
- Survey
- Analysis
Create feature sets
As a product manager, you’ll have to create a set of features and determine the target personas. The feature sets includes alternative options that you need help in determining the importance.
For a project management tool, feature sets can be,
- Task management vs Time tracking
- Collaboration vs Reporting
- Budget tracking vs Task management
- Mobile vs Desktop apps
The target personas for a project management tool can be,
- Freelancers
- Project manager
Surveys
Surveys are in the form of alternative feature list where users can choose which one of them are most and least important. The survey needs to be targeted for different personas for segmented analysis to determine which feature are most important for each persona. Here’s an example of survey for a Project management product.
Once the survey is ready, you can send them for a sample set of personas that you have identified.
Analysis
Once the MaxDiff survey responses were collected, you can analyse the pattern. One of the most used technique to analyse MaxDiff survey result is count analysis that indicates the count of each alternative features that were sleeted by the personas.
The above example shows the count analysis of features that are important to freelancers and project managers. It provides a ranked list of features that helps you determine the maximum value a feature would provide to each persona. For the freelancer persona, task management is the most important feature, followed by mobile app and time tracking. For the project manager persona, reporting and collaboration are the most important feature, followed by time tracking.
These are the 3 steps to discover premium features. By identifying the premium value, it becomes easier to set the pricing plan for each customer segments.
Thanks for reading!
Thinking Alley 