Lessons of a Rookie Product Manager: A Prioritization Framework
If you’re anything like me, you found your first few months (or more) as a Product Manager to be a stream of requests that were, at the best of times, overwhelming.
After one too many bugs reported without enough attached information, I sat down to create an Eisenhower matrix for prioritization that I shared with all teams. I asked that anyone emailing to report a bug or even request a new feature from the team reference this matrix and set a priority level along with the request.
The results were:
- Our team set expectations as to what we would have time to fix or build and what we more than likely wouldn’t
- Made it easy to say NO to requests and clearly point to why
A Prioritization Matrix
Rolling this out reduced the number of requests that we as a team had to deal with as the priority 4 issues were recorded and filed away to look into if we ever managed to fix all the priority 1, 2 and 3 issues. Ultimately, this allowed the team to better focus on the existing backlog with fewer distractions as we could quickly organize requests accordingly.
