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The Prioritization Manifesto
Figuring out the right things to do
Published in
8 min readJun 21, 2022
- Prioritization is not focus. In product development, focus is achieved by having a clear understanding of what makes your product different, i.e., the trade-offs you make at the highest level of your feature strategy by stating what your product is more about and what it is less about and the positioning rationale for each statement— the hard and wide product boundaries and what kind of customer/user experiences could arise from this broad outline. These become your product’s principles, the focus filter that makes downstream prioritization less convoluted. Before you prioritize anything, create your focus filter to position your product against something
- The tyranny of metrics relates to the fallacy that the only thing you can manage is what you can measure, which is a more than worthless principle. Metrics appear as though they are truth — that the numbers can’t lie, which they totally can. But, they do not lie by being wrong about the thing they are measuring, they lie by being wrong about how important something is and how unimportant all the things you can’t measure are. They can become focusing errors. Usually, it is just a lot of other things you are not measuring that matter, or can’t measure. This is why the ultimate fallback metric in any business is life-cycle profits. You need to be careful that…