How to prioritize tasks to make an MVP

Pablo Garcia Pedro
4 min readJan 7, 2022

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We had a situation to solve: as a team we had to be able to generate an MVP in a period of 2 weeks. The product area, specifically the product designer (a.k.a “me”) was in charge of helping the team with a prioritization and task organization exercise. I am going to tell you how my experience was.

First of all, we did an internal brainstorming exercise to see what kind of framework we could generate to solve this casuistry. Then we decided to structure the exercise in 3 phases: Ideation, prioritization and organization. We decided to use MIRO to carry out the session… and here we started!

Context

Houston, we have a problem to solve in Our Squad to generate an MVP for the lifetime warranty

To generate this MVP, we must discover which components are necessary to support a warranty process identifying the building blocks that make it possible.

The goal we want to achieve is the generation of the minimum necessary features to be able to get the job done, subdividing the work in tasks to be able to face it in a better way.

In order to have a better capacity to solve the exercise we must think at all times who our stakeholders are and how the different proposals may affect them.

Let’s get started! this is the first time we are going to create a product from scratch

How does this activity works?

This workshop consists of 3 phases. The first phase is the ideation phase. In it we will leave our comments, which we will then validate all together to move to the next step.

Phase 1 — Ideation

The ideation phase

First part The dreamer. Unleash your creativity. Concentrate on letting ideas flow without criticism or restrictions. Then we will group the ideas by related themes and write a post-it as a summary that represents them.

— Ask yourself: what do we want, what are the potential benefits of this solution?

Second part The realistic. The dream is possible. Assuming we can achieve it, figure out what steps you would have to take to get there.

— Ask yourself: How can we implement this idea? What resources would we need?

Third part The critique. In order to approach this phase, we will filter the ideas beforehand in the “realistic” section and then it is time to discover the possible obstacles.

— Ask yourself: What could go wrong with this idea? What is missing? What are the possible weaknesses?

Phase 2— Prioritization

The prioritization phase

The second phase is the prioritization phase. According to the results obtained from the first exercise, we will rate them according to their impact on the MVP

We will perform a bull’s eye exercise, which consists of 3 circles. The inner circle contains the elements of highest priority, the middle circle contains the elements of medium priority and the largest circle contains the elements of lowest priority.

In the corners of the bull’s eye we will have the stakeholders so that we always have a mentality of which profiles are involved in the assurance from its creation to its follow-up.

Phase 3— Organization

The organization phase

The last phase will consist of a selection and description of the items with the highest priority as a result of the previous exercise in order to generate our MVP.

In this exercise we are going to divide the characteristics that we have obtained in the previous exercise in the possible subtasks and dependencies with other areas that it may contain.

In this way we will get a better organization and structuring of the tasks to be able to work in a more agile way and thus be able to obtain a solution for our MVP.

Learnings 📔

One of the most important things I learned was that the same person having the role of session director and participant at the same time is counterproductive and not very agile because it makes the session take too long.

Another thing I learned is that feedback is very important and in each and every one of the exercises we do as a team there should be a section for it. Thanks to this practice I was able to get inputs in an easier way to improve future sessions.

It is very important to involve stakeholders, it makes us have a much broader and more realistic vision to face these exercises.

Time is gold. We must speed up the exercises as much as possible by working remotely, and having a first phase to be performed asynchronously helps participants to have more context to then focus better on the exercise.

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