Your Product Toolbelt | Roadmap Prioritization
Your Product Toolbelt is for the Founder, the Product Manager, the curious, and anyone who wants to contribute to the discussion.
“When I served as prime minister last time, I failed to prioritize my agenda. I was eager to complete everything at once, and ended my administration in failure. After resigning, for six years I traveled across the nation simply to listen.”
- Shinzo Abe
I love this quote. It reminds me of my first role as a Product Manager — I made so many mistakes, and trying to do too much at once was one of my greatest pitfalls. Shinzo Abe is right to stress listening. It is inherently difficult to align your product strategy to your product roadmap. If done right, the product roadmap is a physical manifestation of your product strategy. This in turn enables the entire organization to concretely take hold of what you aim to build in support of your vision.
Let’s dive into one framework for product prioritization that I learned from Pragmatic Marketing!
Step by Step
Step 1: Where’s the evidence?
Define the Market Evidence for each user scenario that is documented. For beginners, I recommend rolling up a handful of user stories into an Epic (check out the resources at the bottom of the page if this term is new to you).
This must be quantifiable — number of clients affected, number of potential clients affected, number of emails received, number of calls in which this pain was brought up, number of Help Desk inquiries displaying confusion, etc.
Step 2: What’s the impact?
Define the Impact by aligning it with company strategy and goals. Scale can be 1–4, 1–5, 1–10, etc. The important thing here is that the least impactful rating is the least important thing to the company strategy at this point in time and the most impactful rating is the most important as related to the company goals.
Define your scale or you will be inconsistent over time. Break up your impact factors by category. It is hard to define all things at once that can impact your decision. Remember your North Star metric (or other metrics that roll up to it). Keep in mind your other strategic goals.
Step 3: Do some math
Simple math: Market Evidence x Impact = Priority. The ‘math’ element eliminates bias in choosing which features are most important to pursue. Features will be grouped or released stand-alone. Dates will not be committed to, only the next group or groups of stories that we are addressing. This method allows for us to continually respond to the market with RUTHLESS prioritization.
Toolbelt Takeaways
Use the priority score to inform your decision-making process. Do not let this alone rule you. In cases where leadership disagrees, use the logic behind the scoring to show them what led you to this order. Ask questions! Work together. Do not get defensive. Leadership often has insight into much that you can’t see. Don’t roll over, but keep the discussion conversational to lead to the best decision to support the company’s strategy moving forward.
IF YOU LEARN NOTHING ELSE!!
- This holds true from last week — what you build contributes to company goals, which in turn impacts the North Star metric.
- Use every conversation you have to gather information, evidence, and perspective.
- Lean on leadership for their expertise and knowledge, but do not be afraid to disagree using solid evidence!
- No roadmap on January 1st looks the same on December 31st. If it does, there is a MASSIVE problem going on in the organization — you aren’t listening to feedback.
Where We’re At
Congratulations! You have a product 👏 prioritization 👏 framework 👏
Let’s go to market next week …with the product, that is!
Resources
- Impact, Confidence & Effort (I.C.E.) Prioritization by Michael Berliner is a must read about another prioritization method!
- Epics, Stories, Themes, and Initiatives from Atlassian.
- RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers from Intercom.
- More on prioritization from Richard Banfield: A Radical, and Simple, Approach to Product Prioritization.
- Dear Product Roadmap, I’m Breaking Up with You by Heath Umbach.
For more reading, check out these previous posts:
- Your Product Toolbelt
- Your Product Toolbelt | The Problem Statement
- Your Product Toolbelt | Market Sizing
- Your Product Toolbelt | Competitive Analysis
- Your Product Toolbelt | North Star Metric
- Your Product Toolbelt | Discovery
- Your Product Toolbelt | Ideation
- Your Product Toolbelt | Validation
- Your Product Toolbelt | Delivery
- Your Product Toolbelt | Personas
- Your Product Toolbelt | User Stories
