The advantage of this feature set organization is that it visualizes the overall sequence of work on features across releases. It also provides a visually clear way to manage the scope of a release by slipping features into a later release: the lowest priority features in one release are simply moved down the list into a later release.
This feature set organization helps to visualize and manage the risk to the success of the project that is inherent in the scope of each release. If a given release has too many risky features, it will be impossible to have confidence in the schedule. It is better to understand the amount of risk in each release and slip some risky features to later releases.
This is a logical organization of features into feature areas. Each feature area is a group of features that help users accomplish a related set of tasks that support a claimed benefit of the product. For example, if one of the claimed benefits of page layout application is the ability to import and export graphics in standard formats, then all of the individual import and export features will be in the "import/export" feature area.
It is useful to visualize features by feature area as a way to estimate the amount of support given for each claimed benefit. Continuing the page layout application example, if there are no import/export features, then the claimed benefit is not supported. Likewise, if there are far too many import/export features, that indicates that a redesign may be needed.
