3 Things That Help Product Managers Prioritize Better

Picture this:

• A friend of yours is getting late for a flight & you've been summoned to drop them to the airport
• You get on the highway & as luck would have it, you blow out a tire & park the car
• You get your phone out to call for roadside assistance & notice you have a text from a friend asking for soup recommendations

> Getting a friend to the airport.

> Fixing a flat.

> Recommending a soup to a friend.

What order would you solve these issues?

Is the answer obvious or do you need to whip out an Excel file to conduct a cost-benefit analysis?

Similarly, while it's great to adopt structure, Product Managers don't need to overcomplicate matters of prioritization.

Yes, models like RICE & Kano have immense utility for roadmap planning. But I can assure you that most PMs aren't cranking up a framework to plan every sprint or electing the next user story. Intuition also works.

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A few things to keep in mind:

You don't need to lean on a framework to pick the obvious

When planning a sprint, certain tickets will automatically make the next sprint because of their pre-agreed urgency or importance.

Examples:

• A showstopper bug
• A client commitment where the deadline is fixed
• A dependency blocking other builds
• A user story that's been unanimously greenlit across the board

Moreover, assigning Impact and Confidence scores to items like technical debt is tricky. If already agreed with tech, you'd simply load these in the sprint & just focus on the non-obvious areas.

Customize

In my experience, I've rarely applied the vanilla framework as is. It's always served as a baseline which I had to tailor to best fit my purposes.

For example, I once had to extend the RICE framework to include "Strategic Value" as a parameter e.g. consideration that indicates long-term value but not necessarily instant impact.

Similarly, there are multiple flavors of "Effort" required. Development is only one aspect.

A feature might also require pre-requisite data entry or partner training. Moreover, certain user stories might necessitate ongoing effort as well e.g. a content moderation service needs to be staffed which represents cost that might need to be factored in.

Prioritization is an intensely collaborative exercise

Every parameter is owned by a different party. It's impossible to prioritize in silos.

Leadership, product, marketing all have their opinion on impact and value while engineering & design comment on work estimates. Thus, sometimes you need a good old discussion rather than a falling matrix of numbers.

And above all, prioritization starts with your product strategy.

If an opportunity looks great on paper, but your strategy faces in a different direction, then the work item probably shouldn't even make the table of discussion.

Remember: Strategy is all about making choices. It's the first line of defense when it comes to prioritization.