Prioritized Backlog — Needs → Features → Build Order

This page turns the desk findings into a prioritized build order: which real need each feature serves, how strong the opportunity is, how confident we are, and in what order to build.

Read this first

This ranking is built on secondary research (desk) — strong hypotheses, not field-confirmed truth. Two biases to keep in mind:

1. The desk scan mostly probed intermediate pains (clone, sharing, sync), so it under-weights the beginner guided-assistant need — which is real but evidenced only indirectly (the "I built my own brew-day app" threads, the steep-UX complaints, the 40% newcomer inflow). Those rows are tagged under-probed and the interviews must confirm them.
2. The founder is a beginner building (first) for beginners — so we deliberately sequence assistant-first, even where the raw desk score would put the intermediate clone wedge on top.

Prioritization rule

Opportunity = Importance (how strong/frequent the need) × Under-served (how poorly incumbents do it). Then sequence by journey stage, starting with the beginner assistant (acquisition), because that is the founder's accessible segment and the lowest-risk entry (a daily-useful utility beats a community that needs a crowd to exist — cf. AHA Brew Guru's 2026 shutdown).

Confidence labels: validated (strong, multi-source desk signal) · hypothesis (inferred, plausible) · under-probed (real but thinly evidenced — interviews must confirm).

The journey = the spine

Stage 1 — BEGINNER (guided assistant)   →  ACQUISITION   →  the 4-step journey
Stage 2 — REGULAR  (organize & track)   →  RETENTION
Stage 3 — INTERMEDIATE (clone & share)  →  DEPTH         →  the desk's headline wedge

Stage 1 — Beginner assistant · the 4-step journey (build first)

Need	Feature	Opportunity	Confidence
Don't ruin a brew; know what to do, when & why	Guided step-by-step brew-day assistant (mash/boil/cooling, timers, temps, the "why")	High × High = High	under-probed
Succeed on the very first batch, no jargon	Beginner-calibrated recipe catalog (curated, IBU/ABV/volume shown) — journey step 1	High × Med-High = High	hypothesis
Know where my fermentation stands	Fermentation tracking (days, gravity, temperature, progress bar) — journey step 3	High × Med = Med-High	validated
Finish & celebrate	Bottling + label + share with friends — journey step 4	Med × Med = Med	hypothesis
Brewing happens offline (garage/cellar)	Offline-tolerant, no forced sync / no data duplication	High × High = High	validated
Tools feel overwhelming	Clean, uncluttered, playful UX (the proven differentiator)	High × Med = Med (quality bar)	validated

Stage 2 — Regular brewer · organize & track (retention)

Need	Feature	Opportunity	Confidence
My recipes are scattered (notebooks, sheets)	Recipe organization & search (tags by style/ingredient/outcome)	High × Med-High = High	validated
Remember what I did across batches	Batch history / brew log with reviewable notes	High × Med = Med-High	validated
Don't trap my data	BeerXML / BeerJSON import-export (no lock-in, lossless)	High × Med = Med-High	validated
Reliability / don't lose my history	Durable storage, no data loss (a trust message, esp. FR after Joliebulle/Little Bock)	High × Med = Med-High	validated

Stage 3 — Intermediate · clone & community (depth — the desk wedge)

Need	Feature	Opportunity	Confidence
Recreate a specific beer I love	Searchable, curated clone repository	Very High × High = Very High	validated
Published clones are wrong / static	Versioned, community-validated clones (the iteration loop nobody owns)	High × Very High = High	hypothesis
Share without losing authorship	Sharing with author credit (multi-group, bulk export)	Med-High × High = High	validated (EN) / hypothesis (FR)
A shared recipe doesn't fit my kit	Auto-rescale to the recipient's equipment	Med × High = Med-High	hypothesis

Cross-cutting (all stages): a fair, generous free tier — paywall fatigue is one of the strongest desk signals; it's a pricing principle, not a feature. Don't compete on calculation (incumbents win there).

Build order (the answer to "what do we implement, and in what order")

1. P0 — the assistant entry (Stage 1): guided brew-day assistant + beginner catalog + fermentation tracking + clean UX + offline tolerance. This is the wedge we ship and validate first.
2. P1 — retention (Stage 2): organization & search, batch history, BeerXML import/export, durability.
3. P2 — depth (Stage 3): clone repository → versioned clones → credited sharing → auto-rescale.

The clone repository scores Very High on raw opportunity, but it lives in Stage 3 because it serves intermediates and needs a crowd. We enter by the assistant and grow into the community — "the app that grows with the brewer."

What the interviews must settle (ties to the interview guide)

• The biggest open risk: is the beginner assistant truly a strong, willing-to-pay-attention need, or do brewers "graduate" past it too fast to build a business on? (the under-probed rows above).
• Whether attribution-sensitivity holds in FR as it does in EN.
• Whether versioning + auto-rescale is felt as a real need or a nice-to-have.
• Whether intermediates would switch from an entrenched tool.

Until these are answered, treat the order above as the best current bet, not a settled roadmap.