Prioritizing: A Fascinating Task

Prioritization exercises suffer from a chicken & egg problem.

Schemes like RICE require you to estimate the "effort" as part of the model.

But every story in your backlog doesn't have fully fleshed specs. Ballparking effort for the non-trivial items would be like throwing a dart in the dark.

And you wouldn't invest time to spec them unless you knew it was going to win in priority. Hence, chicken & egg.

This is why when you invite tech to key in effort estimates in your backlog sheet, they pepper it with clarifying questions or feel uneasy pulling out a story point.

Tip:

1. Ensure every backlog item is linked to a business metric. Then, bubble up all tasks that map to the current quarter's priority OKRs.

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2. For those cards, consider creating a middleware artefact that lies between a succinct backlog description & a verbose spec in terms of detail.

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Let's call it a perimeter.

A perimeter is a 1-pager that lists:

- target: audience & goal

- inclusions: 3 user flows

- exclusions: flows not included (with indication what might come in the future)

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3. If you need more than 3 flows, split the item.

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4. Share the perimeter with tech to get your effort numbers before running RICE.

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Won't be perfect but will be far closer to the truth.

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