Ruthless prioritization for product people
It’s already a year after my graduation and working full time for the first time. As a new product manager, one of the most important lessons that I learned this year is probably prioritization — ruthless prioritization.
Why Is Prioritization Important
Prioritization is what I do every day as a product manager at a startup company. I prioritize product goals, I prioritize product stories, I prioritize what I need to focus on…
Prioritization is an art and it’s a must-have skill for a product manager. At any given time, we might have dozens of potential user stories that can be turned into value-delivering features. But we only have so much time and our team has only so many resources. It’s impossible to do everything at once. In this case, we need to prioritize for the team — pick the most valuable and impactful story that will help achieve the goal.
Prioritization is important not only for the team but also for everyone in the product team. Even when the product stories are prioritized, you need to decide what you will do next to successfully deliver the product stories — reviewing user research, writing product requirement documents, collaborating with designers…You can’t do everything at once or do everything to perfection. You’ll only burn yourself out. Knowing where you focus your effort can help you achieve the best outcome.
When you master the skill of prioritization, you will be able to deliver the most impactful product and achieve the best outcome with your effort.
Using Prioritization Frameworks as A Scaffold
Prioritization is decision-making and decision-making is taxing for the brain. If we make every decision from the very beginning, we’ll soon be mentally worn out — it’s not a prioritized use of your brain energy. Therefore, it’s often desirable to use a prioritization framework to aid that decision-making process and make your life easier.
In this section, I’ll introduce some useful prioritization frameworks for prioritizing your tasks and your product stories/projects.
Eisenhower Matrix For Your Tasks
The first prioritization framework that I’m going to introduce is the Eisenhower Matrix, which is great for prioritizing your tasks at hand.
The Eisenhower matrix is a 2 by 2 matrix with 4 quadrants, ranking the tasks using their importance and urgency. Each quadrant represents a type of task: Important & Urgent, Important & Not Urgent, Not Important & Urgent, Not Important & Not Urgent.
For the important and urgent tasks, they have the highest priority and you should do them now. For me as a product manager, I would rate the tasks that are related to the most impactful stories in the next sprint in this type.
For the important but not urgent tasks, you can schedule a time for them. You should expect when they will become urgent and come back to them as soon as you finished the first type of task.
The third type of task is not important but urgent. For these tasks, you probably don’t need to do them yourself as they might not have a high stake. You can safely delegate these tasks to someone who can do them for you.
The last type of task is not important and not urgent. These tasks don’t really add value to your work and won’t drive you forward. Don’t even bother doing them. You’ll often find that you can save quite some time by eliminating these tasks.
Start your day by spending a couple of minutes categorizing your to-do items using the Eisenhower matrix. You’ll save much more time than these couple of minutes and deliver more during your day by focusing on the important and urgent tasks.
RICE = Reach * Impact * Confidence / Effort
The second prioritization framework is the RICE framework. I use this framework a lot to manage my product backlog and to plan out my product roadmap. The RICE framework helps me pick the most impactful and valuable stories from a long list of user requests and stories.
The RICE framework scores each story based on four factors that make the acronym: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. For each factor, you will rate it quantitatively and give it a score. Then you will calculate a RICE score for each item by using the equation RICE = Reach * Impact * Confidence / Effort.
You can easily create a RICE scoring sheet in Google Sheets or Excel. Just write the estimated scores for each factor and rank your items using the resulting RICE score.
Reach is how many people you estimate this story will influence in a given timeframe. This can be the absolute number of users who will use this feature, or this can be a percentage of all the users who will use this feature/product.
Impact is the estimation of how this story will help move the needle in your business metrics. This can be a difficult factor to estimate, but try the best you can. I use the following scores for categorizing the impact: 3 = massive impact, 2 = high impact, 1 = medium impact, 0.5 = low impact, 0.1 = minimal impact.
Effort is the resources you need to make the story a reality. We often measure this in terms of a person-day development time.
Confidence measures how confident you are in your estimations of the other factors. You can use a percentage to rate your confidence. 100% means you’re highly confident about your estimates, 80% means medium confidence, and 50% means low confidence. As you do more research and gather more data, you may find your confidence increase.
As long as you’re using consistent scoring for each item, you can get a (relatively) unbiased, prioritized list. Pick the item at the very top of the list and make it happen.
MoSCoW: Must, Should, Could, Won’t
The next prioritization framework is the MoSCoW prioritization method. This is another prioritization for managing product requirements/features.
This method is most useful when you’re planning a new product launch and you’re going to decide which set of features would be prioritized before the fixed release date.
The capitalized letters in MoSCoW stand for Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Won’t Have.
Must-Have requirements are the most prioritized ones. As the name suggests, they are non-negotiable requirements. Without these requirements, your product won’t be complete and there is no point in still shipping on the release date.
Should-Have requirements are still important, but they’re not absolutely needed to make your product viable. For these features, you can try to find workarounds or arrange them for the next release if they cannot make it this time.
Could-Have requirements are desirable, but not as important as the first two categories. You can improve users’ experience if these features are added, but leaving them out won’t have a serious impact compared to the should-haves.
Won’t-Have (this time) requirements are the requirements that you will not include in this release. Making it clear which requirements will not be included can set a clear boundary and help the team stay focused.
This is a prioritization framework and a good communication tool. Using these four categories, you can get your whole team and stakeholders aligned on which requirements need the most resources and focus.
Kano: Satisfy Your Users
The last prioritization framework that I’m going to introduce today is the Kano Model, named after Noriaki Kano.
This model is a little bit different from the other prioritization frameworks introduced earlier. While the other ones focus more on allocating resources, this model helps to prioritize product requirements/features based on how they’re likely to satisfy customers/users.
The Kano model categorizes product features/stories into five categories: basic, delighters/attractive, performance/one-dimensional, indifferent, and dissatisfaction/reverse.
The basic features are the must-have features for your product. Customers/users expect these features in your product and take them for granted.
The delighters/attractive features are the value-adds. When they’re in your product, your customers will be surprised and satisfied; when they’re not there, your customers might not miss them.
The performance/one-dimensional features give you linear returns as you invest in them. Customers will be satisfied the more you have these features and they’ll be dissatisfied when they’re taken away.
The indifferent ones have no impact on customer/user satisfaction. They might not provide any value to customers directly. But in some cases, they might provide value to you and your team, for example, refactoring your codebase.
The reverse features make your customers/users unhappy and dissatisfied when they’re in your product. They negatively impact your product. If they’re already in your product, you should remove them; if they’re not in your product, don’t add them.
You should prioritize the basic, delighters/attractive, and performance/one-dimensional features and make your product roadmap around these features. Leave the indifferent and reverse features out of your product roadmap. You can use this method in combination with other frameworks like the MoSCoW method.
Prioritize To Make Impact
Ruthless prioritization is important for you and your product. You should focus on the most valuable initiatives with your limited resources and make the biggest impact possible.
These prioritization frameworks can help you reduce a lot of mental effort while planning your tasks and your product releases/roadmaps. They’re not strict rules but helpful guides. You could adapt them based on your own needs.
