Practical Product How-to: The Art of Prioritisation
Welcome to our first article!
We decided to focus on Prioritisation as it was one of the areas for improvement highlighted by the PMs surveyed in our State of Product Management in Africa Report.
Prioritisation is one of those words an average PM is bound to come across more often than not. While it is clear that prioritisation is an important part of product management, knowing why or how to prioritise is not as obvious.
Put simply, prioritising is the art of figuring out how to order tasks, initiatives or projects based on importance. It is crucial to successful product management because it ensures you’re providing the most important value at any given time.
Prioritisation happens on a daily basis. We prioritise our to-do list, we prioritise our daily schedules (when to eat, when to sleep, when to workout or take a break). In the world of Product Management where the product is never really done this is an important discipline. Being able to effectively determine what is important and when to begin is vital.
Steps to Prioritising
What are some practical ways to effectively prioritise? Here’s our approach to prioritisation.
1. Ensure you’re aligned: another product buzzword. Alignment simply means being in agreement. Let’s build on the example above. Say you’re preparing for your marathon and have your priorities right. You know you need to get enough sleep and eat right as the big day draws nearer. But you have a flatmate, and your flatmate decides to play loud music all week. In this case, it is clear that you and your flatmate are not aligned.
To gain alignment make sure you understand the goals of the organisation. What is important to the organisation as a whole? What’s important in the short term? The frequency at which these goals change will differ from one organisation to the other, it is crucial to make this a regular discussion point for you and your manager. The goal is for you (and your team) to confidently be able to understand what’s important at any given point.
2. Update your list of priorities: as a product manager value is tied to outcomes instead of output. At the end of the day, solving problems is what counts. What matters more than the effort that went into building something is the impact that was created as a result of it. From delivery to discovery, you want to make sure that your list of priorities is always up to date. Some teams plan out their product roadmap a year ahead, others have much shorter cycles.
Regardless of what your roadmap cycle looks like, it’s important to constantly have regular check-ins with your manager and other stakeholders to ensure that you’re still working on the right things. Depending on how fast paced your organisation is, doing this on a weekly or a bi-weekly basis might be ideal. Building on step 1, once you’re aligned with the rest of the organisation it’s easier for you to make decisions about trade-offs, what to de-prioritise or prioritise, in line with the overall objectives.
3. Choose a framework: at the point you are fully aligned and have a clear set of prioritised objectives. The next step is to prioritise delivery. This is vital to the execution process because it means that you’re able to provide value as quickly as possible. There are a plethora of frameworks to choose from, but here are some of the easiest to get started with:
MoSCoW: MoSCoW stands for Must Haves, Should Haves, Could Haves, Won’t Haves. Since resources are limited (time, people) you want to be sure that what you deliver will have a significant impact.
Value vs Effort: this compares the benefits an initiative will provide against the effort required to implement this. You’d want to have a good mix of high-impact, low-effort initiatives (which represent quick wins) but also high-impact, high-effort initiatives (which may represent big-bets). Of course, anything in the lower half of the quadrant which represents low-value, low-effort or high-effort low-value should be de-prioritised. Sometimes, because an initiative is low-value it’s easy to get tempted to throw it in. But if the focus is outcomes over output then this would signify that the resources weren’t used effectively.
RICE: rice is an acronym which stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence & Effort. If you’re looking for a more mathematical way of prioritising then this might just be for you. Here’s how to calculate your RICE score.
Reach: this is a numerical figure that represents the expected number of people your initiative or new feature will reach over a given period.
E.g you have an existing user base of 200,000 users and intend to launch a new feature that will reach 20% of these users in a month. Your reach here is 40,000.
Impact: this refers to how much of an effect you anticipate the initiative will have on your users. To calculate impact, use the rating scale below.
3 = massive impact
2 = high impact
1 = medium impact
.5 = low impact
.25 = minimal impact
Confidence: this is measured in percentages. The higher the percentage, the more confident the team is about being able to execute. To express your confidence there are 3 options:
100% - denotes high confidence
80% - means medium confidence
50% - this means the confidence is low
Understandably, projects with higher confidence levels typically mean they are less risky to execute.
Effort: finally, we have effort which calculates the level of effort required for the particular initiative. Effort is calculated based on inputs related to human capital. This ranges from anything from the product team, to design, engineering, QA etc and is calculated based on person months.
Building on all of the above, the RICE score can be gotten by using the following formula: Reach * Impact * Confidence / Effort
4. Execute quickly: when you’ve come up with your list of prioritised initiatives and have gone on to prioritise the features to be built, you want to also prioritise delivery. For instance, you might have an initiative with 3 must-have features, 5 should have features, 3 could-have features and 2 won’t have features. You can decide to develop the must-haves first, and deliver value to your customers in iterations.
Is there any right framework? The goal of the prioritisation framework is to help you arrive at ordering the right set of initiatives so that you get the most value out of the resources invested. Feel free to experiment with the different frameworks and apply them as you deem fit.
On a final note, prioritising has more to do with sequencing the work than it has to do with identifying great ideas. We will talk about the process of finding great ideas in subsequent articles where we talk about the discovery process.
Amazing write up, I loved it.
I seem to have a problem with the Value effort framework as I think it is not very effective in prioritization.
I came across an interesting one recently which is a hybrid of the value/effort. It's called Risk/certainty framework.