Understanding Product: Prioritization
The reality of building products is we can never get everything done. At least not all at once.
As a product manager, you get constrained by time, money, business requirements, talent, and ideas. Over time, you have learned the art of prioritization to deliver features and products.
By the end of this article, you would understand the meaning of prioritization and the frameworks and approaches used to deliver business value in the quickest possible way, given a variety of constraints.
What is Prioritization?
Prioritization is a continuous way of evaluating the relative importance of work, ideas, and requests to minimize wasteful practices and deliver customer value as quickly as possible, despite the limitations.
Benefits of Prioritization
- You will be working on the highest business value item
- You will be delivering the necessary value to customers
- Your work will be aligned with the organization’s goals and objectives
- You will have a quick market launch
Steps to Prioritization
- Be aligned with your stakeholders: Making a prioritized roadmap cannot be based solely on an individual’s opinion. A data-centric approach is well recommended. There are ways to gather data and to make informed decisions on your potential action plans. Having users fill surveys, dig into customer support transcripts, and running user testing are some of the common ways you can gain insight into the customers’ needs and market trends.
With the appropriate data, it becomes easy for you and the product stakeholders to align and build the product roadmap best suited to achieving the business objectives.
The idea is for you (and your team) to confidently understand what matters at any given time. - Now that you’ve weeded out all the potential opportunities that don’t provide strategic value, the next step is to score your remaining initiatives. As a product manager, value is tied to the outcome as it matters more than the effort it takes. Let’s get into two common prioritization frameworks that can assist us in providing value as fast as possible.
- MoSCoW: MoSCoW stands for Must Haves, Should Haves, Could Haves, Won’t Haves. The interstitial Os are added to make the word pronounceable. You will find how to easily use this framework using the image I created below.
- RICE: The RICE score system is another important prioritizing approach, with four factors to assist determine priority: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. To calculate your score, simply multiply Reach by Impact, and then by Confidence. Then divide by Effort. Your final score represents ‘total impact per time worked.’ The higher the number, the closer you are to high impact/low effort.
3. Quickly execute: After you’ve created your list of prioritized projects and prioritized the features to be produced, you should also prioritize delivery. For example, you may have a project with three must-have features, five should-have features, three could-have features, and two will-not-have features. You have the option of prioritizing the must-haves and providing value to your consumers.
Conclusion
An effective product prioritization process garners support from stakeholders, inspires a vision in your team, and minimizes the risk of working on something that nobody wants.
