Prioritization is one of the key responsibilities of a product manager. If you’re relatively new to the role, you may find it overwhelming to prioritize a seemingly endless amount of feature requests, bug fixes, and strategic improvements. So, how do you even begin to decide what will make it into your roadmap and what will not? How do you balance the needs of the business, the demands of stakeholders, and the limitations of your team?
In this post, we’ll discuss a few popular ways to tackle prioritization and help you to get started!
The Importance of Prioritization
At the surface level, prioritization might seem like an exercise in choosing what to work on first, but it’s far more than that. Effective prioritization helps you:
- Align with Business Goals: Features should contribute to your company’s overarching objectives.
- Maximize Team Productivity: By focusing on the most crucial features, you prevent resource waste.
- Satisfy User Needs: At the end of the day, a product is only successful if it meets the needs and wants of its users.
Identifying Stakeholders
Before you start the prioritization process, identify the stakeholders involved:
- Business Executives: Mostly care about about ROI, growth, scalability, and market penetration.
- Development Team: Provide insights into what is technically feasible given available resources.
- Users: As the consumers of your product, you must strive to provide a tool they draw value from.
Collecting Data
As a data-driven junior product manager, your decisions should be based on concrete information:
- User Surveys: Conduct surveys to understand what users are looking for.
- Analytics: Use tools like Google Analytics to identify user behavior.
- Stakeholder Interviews: Sit down with different departments to understand their perspectives.
- Competitor Analysis: Look at similar products to identify what they are doing right (or wrong).
Popular Prioritization Frameworks
Here are some widely used frameworks for prioritizing features:
MoSCoW Method
Divide the feature list into four categories:
- Must-Haves: Features that are critical for launch. Your application cannot provide recognizable value without these.
- Should-Haves: Important but not critical. Your application will differentiate itself over other alternatives with these.
- Could-Haves: Nice-to-haves that are considered least critical. These are effectively the “cherries-on-top.”
- Won’t-Haves: Features that won’t be included in the current roadmap, but might be considered later.
Kano Model
This model categorizes features into five categories based on how they are perceived by users:
- Basic Needs: Features that customers expect.
- Performance Needs: Features that could lead to customer satisfaction if present but dissatisfaction if absent.
- Excitement Needs: Unexpected features that could delight customers.
- Indifferent Needs: Features that do not have a significant impact on customer satisfaction.
- Reverse Needs: Features that could cause dissatisfaction for some customers if implemented.
RICE Score
RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort:
- Reach: Who does this feature impact?
- Impact: What impact will this feature have on KPIs?
- Confidence: How confident are you about the impact and ease scores?
- Effort: How easy is it to implement the feature?
Calculate the ICE score with the formula:
RICE = (Reach * Impact * Confidence) / Effort
Practical Steps for Prioritization
Step 1: Create a Feature List
Gather all the features and user requests you’re considering. This list can include large features, small tweaks, bug fixes, etc. Consolidate feature request board (sometimes called an idea board) from which you record any idea that comes up with respect to improving your product.
Step 2: Score Each Feature
Use any of the frameworks mentioned above to score each feature or request.
Step 3: Discuss with Your Team
Open the floor for discussion with your development team. They can provide technical insights into what’s possible in the given time frame. Depending on how in tune your development team is with the business’ vision, market opportunities, and/or your users, they may also help further refine your feature list and propose alternative approaches to consider.
Step 4: Create a Roadmap
Based on your prioritization, create a roadmap that aligns with business objectives and your stakeholders’ needs.
Step 5: Get Stakeholder Buy-in
Before moving forward, ensure all primary stakeholders are on board with the roadmap. Transparency is a valuable trait in not only development, but also adoption and change management.
Step 6: Execute and Monitor
Begin the execution phase. Continuously monitor the performance of features once they are launched. The first half of the battle is getting something out in the field. The second half is understanding how it gets used on the field.
Pitfalls to Avoid
- Over-Prioritizing Business Needs: The business side of things is crucial, but ignoring what users want could be disastrous.
- Focusing Only on ‘Cool’ Features: Features should solve problems, not just look cool.
- Ignoring Data: Always look at data; avoid relying solely on gut feelings.
Conclusion
Feature prioritization is a balancing act at the end of the day. As a product manager, understanding how to juggle business needs, user expectations, and technical limitations is crucial to your product’s and your career’s success.
By using a structured framework to approach prioritization and involving all stakeholders throughout the decision-making process, you can make better decisions and thus better satisfy your users’ needs. Remember, prioritization is an ongoing process; always be ready to adapt your priorities based on new data, changing business goals, and stakeholder feedback.