Exploring How Feature Usage Relates to Customer Perceived Value: A Case Study in a Startup Company.

Most of the business value of a software product comes from only a small proportion of its features. Product managers face the challenge of identifying the high value features in an application and weeding out the ones of low value from the next releases. What creates this challenge is the fact that customer perceived value is an attribute, dimensions of which are not well-known yet. Currently, software companies try to assess the value of features through interviewing a number of key stakeholders. However, the literature suggests that, this kind of evaluation could be misleading due to stakeholders having different understanding of what value refers to. In this paper, through an exploratory case study, we investigate how usage of features relate to their perceived value and shed light into the factors affecting this relationship. The results show that feature usage metric has a significant potential to estimate value of features.