Needs, Wants, Desires

Supplies needed: Post-its, Sharpie, Whiteboard

Estimated time: 30 min

Best to use when

Needs, Wants, Desires is a Card Sorting exercise to help figure out priorities. It's best to use when there are a lot of feature ideas being thrown around when there isn't a good sense of which is the most important.

Instructions:

1. List out feature ideas on Post-its.

2. Divide up the whiteboard into 3 sections: Needs, Wants, and Desires

3. For the first feature,

   add it to Needs if it is critical to the job to be done,

   Wants if it is supplemental to the main job to be done,

   Desires if it outside of the main job to be done.

   It is best to reflect on the Problem Statement

   while doing this.

4. Repeat for each of the remaining ideas.

5. Once all of the features are sorted,

   look at each section and the features in them

   and verify that each feature in is the appropriate section.

Examples

Needs, Wants, Desires