prioritize:

/prīˈôrəˌtīz//praɪˈɔrəˌtaɪz

1. Designate or treat (something) as being very or most important.
2. Determine the order for dealing with (a series of items or tasks) according to their relative importance.

The importance of prioritization as a skill in Product management cannot be overstated.

Why it’s important:

1. Tim Kern (Starbucks’ Coffee Guru) says: “There’s nothing worse than bad coffee brewed properly.” Going after the wrong problem is worse than failing on the right one.
2. Time is key to a product success and time wasted NOT working on the most important issue is a lost opportunity.
3. You are compromising energy, resources, value, skill, the opportunity for success when you don’t work on the right problem at the right time.

This is how I would think of prioritizing:

1. Constant tradeoffs: making hard decisions as frequently and objectively as possible on what you don’t want to do. Think about prioritization between Product Roadmaps vs Backlogs.
2. Use a number of tools and frameworks to consistently evaluate a project, product, problem. Consider quantitative data but also qualitative.
3. Break down a project into granular steps from design and planning all the way to release and maintenance and even further next versions, future pipeline.
4. Ask fundamental questions such as Will doing this project give us a Strategic/Competitive advantage? Will it delight my users? Will it satisfy my stakeholders/investors?
5. Prioritization doesn’t stop at the product planning stage. You need to constantly think about it to prevent scope creeps.
6. Collaboration over consensus. This idea was introduced to me while reading this interesting medium article. Getting your team to collaborate and be part of the process of prioritization rather than presenting and voting on work done in isolation.
7. Knowing that mistakes will be made. No tool or framework will give you the right answer all the time.
8. Always trusting your gut and product instincts.

A list of proven tools that help me prioritize:

1. Ian McAllister’s prioritization framework [https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-ways-to-prioritize-a-list-of-product-features]
2. Weighted scoring and Ranking. of importances categorized mostly inward facing dimensions. These could be Ease of Implementation, Time, Availability of Data, Technical Feasibility, Knowledge (Know-How), Availability of Expertise and so on. Also, remember ROI is difficult to measure accurately at this stage of the product and that an ROI could be very different than a company ROI or customer value.
3. GAP Analysis particularly Opportunity Scoring.
4. Classic Kano Model
5. Mapping Value vs Complexity quadrants and so on.

Lastly, think about avoiding the classic biases like Groupthink and Sunk Cost Fallacy that may occur during the process. More on biases soon…