Prioritizing Product Development in a Startup

Scott Gartenberg
Nov 4 · 2 min read

If you are a member of a product team with limited resources, then you know all too well the importance of prioritization.

As a product manager in a startup with a product team of ~5 people, I’ve needed to deal with sporadic fires and priorities that shift on a frequent basis, sometimes weekly. While this can make maintaining an up-to-date backlog and a clear strategic head challenging, upon reflection it has actually helped me realize what the most important initiatives are for our product and our company in the short and long term.

So in the process of managing weekly releases that incorporate bug fixes, feature requests and longer-term goals, I have developed a “framework” for assessing how important and urgent a ticket item is. The questions/criteria I use are:

  • Does this impact many or most of our customers directly? Note in early companies customer concentration can be present, and 1 company can end up doing more dictating than the textbook says they should.
  • Is this bug hurting our sales team’s ability to close more deals? Or would developing this new feature have an immediate positive impact on the “sellability” of our product?
  • Top-level leadership: I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that there are times where my CEO informs our team that a certain item needs to be prioritized for strategic reasons. Maybe an enterprise level deal is on the line or a potential investor has a concern that needs to be addressed. It is my belief that as a company grows and the product team develops a more rigid development structure and process, the ability for these requests to stop traffic and change priorities on the drop of a hat should decline.
  • Scalability: for most tech companies today, we are collecting a ton of data and have complex infrastructure. If data is not organized and processed properly, major financial and technical issues can arise. These problems need to be squashed if they present themselves.

Of course, there are many factors to always consider when prioritizing work. These are just the ones that are top of mind for me at all times.

What would you add to the list?

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