The product manager superpower: with great prioritization comes great opportunity
We all know how hard prioritization can be. Often as product managers we have a backlog of 100’s of feature requests, bugs and ideas, which then need to be aligned with business strategy, product vision and goals, the roadmaps of other teams, other projects and so forth. It was the legendary Spider-Man who said “with great power, comes great responsibility”. But for us product managers, the truth is that with great prioritization, comes great opportunity.
One of our values at Atlassian is to build with heart and balance — we genuinely care about what we are making and who we are making it for, but we must also balance multiple priorities and tradeoffs. This is a value that carries forward into the product managers prioritization responsibility.
Effective prioritization is a skill which takes product managers years to develop, commonly making mistakes along the way. Early in my career, I would pivot my teams short term roadmap frequently. If the CEO was asking about a feature, we better build that next. Or, feature X would land us a big client, we better start on that ASAP. Whilst a quick pivot may be sometimes necessary, the future can feel unpredictable for your team (and teams dependent on yours), moving your team (and product) further away from achieving the product vision.
Considering a range of factors including customer impact and strategic alignment and using this to prioritize your backlog, instead of listening to the loudest voice is a much more effective way to prioritize all the features that could come on to your team’s roadmap. When your team understands how and why features have been prioritized, they will feel more motivated and empowered to make better decisions and trade-offs during execution.
My top tips for prioritization
Some of you may be thinking by now, well duh, of course a prioritized backlog is the best way to build up your roadmap, thats product management 101, but how do I actually do this?
Well, to help you, I have distilled my learnings down to 4 key tips. These tips are helpful for all product managers, regardless of the size of your product. However, they do become increasingly useful as your product scales and your have an increasing number of priorities, stakeholders and customer needs which you need to tradeoff.
My top 4 tips when prioritizing:
- Use a framework
- Make scoring quick and easy
- Add heart through customer feedback
- Review rankings with balance
Here’s how I use these tips myself, in my role of Senior Product Manager for Jira Work Management.
Tip one: use a framework
There are many prioritization frameworks out there for product managers. Some of the most popular ones are RICE, the Kano model, the MoSCoW method, value vs. effort, opportunity scoring, affinity grouping, cost of delay, buy a feature and story mapping. Frameworks are a useful tool to help standardise, minimise subjectivity and avoid over analysing each backlog item.
Personally, I’m a big fan of the RICE framework (developed by Intercom). RICE looks at a variety of factors and can be backed by data and insights.
RICE is based on the scoring of four criteria:
Reach: how many customers will benefit from the feature in a set timeframe
Impact: the measurable impact to customers or the business
Confidence: your confidence in your reach and impact scores
Effort: the number of resources needed to complete the feature
A RICE score is then calculated as (Reach*Impact*Confidence)/Effort
Working example
I manage my backlog and prioritization scoring in a Discovery project in Jira Product Discovery (learn more about Jira Product Discovery here)
Each feature idea is a separate line item, which we use to capture all the relevant information.
Tip two: make scoring quick and easy
If your methodology for reviewing your backlog items is not quick and easy, you and your team will not do it frequently enough and you risk a stale backlog (I recommend reviewing your backlog at least monthly). This is perhaps my biggest learning in prioritization.
One hack I use when prioritizing is to build a data reference — a collection of existing data points which can be used to gauge reach. The purpose of this data is to give a quick indication of how many of your users will be impacted by a particular feature and how this compares to all the other potential features in your backlog.
A similar method can also be used when rating effort. If your backlog has general ideas or problems to solve, keep your effort scores high level through t-shirt sizing (extra small, small, medium, large and extra large), then work on granular effort estimates once the solution is designed. The goal at the prioritization stage is just to understand the relative effort of one item against all others in the backlog. I also find it helpful to make a number of assumptions as you are working through the effort scores with your team. But make sure to document these for future reference!
Working example
Data on key events within your product can be used as a quick reference to determine your Reach score.
When I am prioritizing in my Discovery project backlog, I match the relevant product area to the corresponding event in my Reach data table.
It’s also valuable to align with your team to build a reference point for your effort scoring. The higher level your backlog initiatives are, the higher level your effort scoring should be. But if your backlog has well defined initiatives and solutions, more precise effort estimates can be used.
Tip three: add heart through customer feedback
Listen to your customers! I am super passionate about including customer feedback into my prioritization methodology. Customer feedback is a great source of insight into what problems matter for customers.
I use customer feedback volumes to help determine the impact a feature may have. Feedback volume is not the core input I use for impact scoring; I also evaluate the impact the feature will have on my teams mission, goals and success metrics. But if a particular feature has high volumes of feedback, I will increase the impact score accordingly.
Working example
In Jira Work Management, our in-product feedback comes through to a Service project in Jira Service Management, which the team labels for easy future reference.
Tip four: review rankings with balance
Once I complete my RICE scoring, I will review my list of stack ranked features. More often than not, I will move these around according to a number of other factors. These include strategic priorities, dependencies from other teams, competitor offerings and so forth. This will mean that sometimes a feature with a lower RICE score will appear at the top of the backlog and this is OK, if there is sound reasoning for prioritizing in this way.
This is also a great time to involve other stakeholders if you haven’t done so already. You can brief them on your methodology, highlight items that have been prioritized due to other factors and ask them to review and provide any feedback on your prioritized list.
Working example
Sharing your Discovery project with your wider team and stakeholders helps to engage them in your prioritization process.
So now you know how to develop your prioritization superpower!
My one last parting tip is to just give it a go! Pick a framework, set-up a process and try some of my methods above to use customer feedback and data to guide you. Prioritizing with heart and balance is both an art AND a science. As a result of this, there is no “one right way” to prioritize — making developing this skill as a Product Manager challenging, especially for those new to the craft. But once mastered, you will be able to use this superpower to swing your team and product to new heights.
Are my tips useful? Let me know in the comments section below. I’d also love to hear other experiences, tips and/or learnings from other product managers mastering the art (and science) of prioritization.
