Prioritising the right feature set using theme based roadmapping
The highest leverage task that any product manager can do is prioritizing the features which their team will work on in the upcoming months. It’s a high risk, high reward responsibility.
In the previous article, we discussed how to generate a solid backlog of customer ideas and problems.
In this article, we are going to use the backlog to identify the set of priorities which the team should be working on.
Let’s dive in!
A nicely classified product backlog will have two sets of items:
- Acquisition items — Feature requests to help acquire new customers.
- Retention items — Pain points of existing customers.
There is a third distinct set which needs to be added to the list:
- Tech debt items — ‘Tech debt’ refers to the additional cost of rework that would be needed because the team chose an easy solution to meet deadlines instead of the ideal approach that would take longer — Wikipedia.
If tech debt is not “repaid”, it can slow down future development of newer features.
Its the responsibility of the engineering item to prepare and share the list of tech debt items with you before the planning cycle begins.
With the above list added, its now time to start prioritizing the most important items from your product backlog.
Identify themes in your product backlog
Looking at the entire backlog of ideas and customer problems might make the prioritization exercise seem more daunting than it actually is.
A great starting point is to identify high level themes for your product and then group the different ideas/requests in the backlog according to these themes.
A theme can be considered as a high level strategic objective for your product. — ProductPlan
For example — for a messaging app like WhatsApp, themes could be reliability, privacy, payments, video calling, chat engagement etc.
To identify themes, use the following:
- Look at the product backlog and see if if there are certain trends which can be used to group feature requests.
- Understand the core flows in your product which most users need to pass through — For eg. user onboarding, checkout etc.
- Review your product strategy and understand your organization’s strategic priorities. Using these, you should be able to identify high level themes which product development should be focused on.
Benefits of themes
- When you create a theme based roadmap, it becomes much easier to prioritize features that aligns with the organization’s priorities.
- It also helps you present a more compelling case to your leadership and get buy-in.
- For strategically important themes, you can even negotiate with the leadership to allocate dedicated engineer(s) & designer(s) to expediate work on those themes.
Which prioritization framework to follow
Multiple frameworks like RICE, Kano, MoSCoW etc exist for feature prioritization. I have earlier talked about the challenges you face while using any prioritization framework.
I believe that the ultimate purpose of a framework is to help you rank the feature requests in order of priority. Personally, I like how a framework helps one think more deeply about each feature request in the list.
I primarily see frameworks as a way of helping one think more deeply about each of the items in the backlog. So, rather than taking the scores of each item at face value, we should see frameworks as a way of identifying the highest leverage items. (Higher the score for an item, more is the certainty with which we can prioritize that item)
I use the RICE framework (developed by Intercom) for scoring items in the product backlog. This includes assigning four scores to each item in the list — Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort.
RICE score is obtained using the following formula:
RICE Score = (Reach X Impact X Confidence) / Effort
You can choose any framework which your organization prefers. The goal is to get a high level understanding of the business value of the feature and the effort associated with building it.
How do themes and prioritization frameworks fit together?
With theme based roadmapping, you may say that why do we need to assign prioritization scores.
Given the time constraints, it will never be possible to prioritize all requests falling under strategically important themes. From a particular theme, you might get a chance to prioritize only a couple of feature requests belonging to that theme. Thus, the prioritization framework helps you identify the most important items within each theme.
Making trade-offs while prioritizing
With the themes and scores ready, you are in a position to identify the items which can make it your roadmap.
Follow these best practices to make sure you prioritize what’s best for the organization:
1. Understand the stage which the company is in
Answer to this will influence a lot of your prioritization.
For eg, as an early stage startup where revenue is a big concern, you would want to focus on the ‘acquisition items’ — features that will help you attract new customers.
Alternatively, you may observe that you have a significant customer base but are unable to retain them for long. In this case, you would want to focus on the ‘retention items’ — fixing the pain points of existing customers.
As a product manager, you have to strike the right set of balance between the different sets of items. Be aware of the leadership’s views on what’s the most important metric for the company to chase at a particular time. This will help you make informed trade-offs while prioritizing.
2. Dealing with features having lower certainty
There may be large effort items on whose priority the entire team is not aligned on.
If there are significant differences between the team on a particular feature, I would suggest getting more validation on the project from your customers. In order to do this, you could:
- Run a quick survey with the people who requested this feature and understand whether the feature is a MUST HAVE or a GOOD TO HAVE.
- Discuss with the sales and account management teams to see how frequently does the feature request come up in conversations.
Based on the feedback, see if you want to prioritize the project.
3. Making space for tech debt items
Tech debt items will seem like a big waste of time as they don’t move any business metric in the short term. However, its critical from a long term perspective.
You can accommodate tech debt in either of the following ways —
- One sprint every quarter could be dedicated to the tech debt items. OR
- It could continue as a parallel track (along with routine development work), where 1 or 2 engineers keep working on fixing the tech debt.
4. Making space for the the customer delighters
Gradually, you need to go beyond fulfilling obvious customer pain points and deal breakers.
To differentiate your product and delight the customers, its important to build features that go beyond meeting the basic expectations of customers.
Every quarter, make sure to have atleast 1 or 2 customer delighters as part of your prioritized feature list. Identifying these delighters is a challenging task and I would like to touch upon this in a different article.
Important Points to remember
- Prioritization is a collaborative exercise — Get early inputs from your peers and senior leadership on the product backlog.
- Look at prioritization frameworks as a way of eliminating items that won’t have much impact. Identifying the final prioritized list often requires a lot more qualitative inputs.
- At times, there might be a manual workaround for resolving a particular customer pain point. In such a scenario, see if its feasible to delay the respective feature and build something which does not have a workaround.
Conclusion
Feature Prioritization is as much an art as science.
It starts with creating a properly classified product backlog of ideas. Then, its about identifying the high level themes you want to focus on and knowing what state is your company currently in.
Once you have these details, you can do a start ranking the items in the product backlog based on the prioritization framework of your choice. The list of items you choose this way, should hopefully help you maximise the ROI generated for your business and customers!
References
This is the final article in the 3 part series on prioritizing features and building a product roadmap. Part 1 of this series talked about the challenges involved in using frameworks. Part 2 of this series talked about how to maintain a properly classified product backlog.
