Dear product managers — tired of the 2 x 2 matrix? Consider bullseye prioritization instead
Need to figure out a way to convince your management team that their latest idea is going to be a waste of resources? Break out the 2 x 2.
Struggling to decide between feature enhancements with your engineering team? Gotta be the 2 x 2.
Not sure what to order for lunch? Sure, it can’t hurt to map out impact vs effort for that too.
The 2 x 2 is the swiss army knife of prioritization, and its usefulness is undeniable. There’s also something deeply satisfying about seeing those items appear in that top priority box.
But there are occasions when it can be challenging to get right, in particular when trying to prioritize in large groups in a workshop setting — some people can get analysis paralysis when ranking two items against each other, to say nothing of an entire board with two axes. You’ve probably also been in a situation where after the 2 x 2 ranking is finished, you’ve realized the conclusions it’s giving you are really strange (usually due to poor selection of your secondary axis — I’ve illustrated a couple of examples of how that happened to me below).
So if you’re prioritizing, is there really no alternative to doing the consultant thing and breaking out the 2 x 2?
Well — if you’ve spoken to your technical team and have estimated a rough effort score for all of the options, then…yes…there really is no alternative to the ‘Impact vs Effort’ 2 x 2.
But that board above has 7 sticky notes on it — and it would have taken time for your engineers to estimate the effort for each of those items. And before you get to that point — you may have had 20 or 30 items that you want to work on. How do you prioritize those 20 or 30 items down to the 7 work items you see in the above impact-effort table?
Well — you could use another 2 x 2, for example, Impact to Revenue vs Impact to User Satisfaction, and you’d probably want to do that in a workshop with your key stakeholders.
Challenges I’ve faced with a 2 x 2
However, it doesn’t always make sense to force that second axis when there really is only one key consideration.
A case in point was a recent workshop we had where we were brainstorming system improvements to our grant management workflow with our stakeholders, and we realized that our key consideration was the processing time by our finance team.
While there were secondary considerations (e.g. security implications, adherence to grant policy guidelines), none of these warranted having an entire axis on its own.
When doing some pre-work for the workshop, we also found that certain secondary axes were somewhat redundant — as in the case below where finance processing time had a direct correlation with the impact on customer satisfaction — making this 2 x 2 fairly redundant.
Other problems arose when we tried to map out impact to finance officers’ processing time vs impact to our account managers’ processing time (as they’re also involved in the grant application and claims process). The issue here was that this would have made us prioritize 3 less critical that impacted both finance and account managers over our most critical item that impacted the finance team alone — essentially rewarding quantity over quality.
Making the decision to use a bullseye framework for our workshop
To see if we could overcome some of these issues, our UX lead, Arun, recommended that we try using a bullseye prioritization for the actual workshop.
Before we started, we got our team to list out everything that they considered important when prioritizing these system improvements.
It looked something like this:
- Speed of processing of internal finance officers (key factor)
- Speed of processing by account managers (secondary factor)
- Better coordination between finance and other divisions (secondary factor)
- Meet compliance and documentation requirements (secondary factor)
- Adherence to policy guidelines (secondary factor)
Many of the above are related to and contribute to each other, but it helped to have these in mind as they went into the prioritization exercise.
Then, we split the group into 2 groups of 5 (to ensure the group sizes were small enough to give everyone a voice), and had them prioritize these system improvements on a target board, instead of on a 2 x 2.
The 18 system improvements were listed to the left of the target board.
We then told them they could put:
- 2 in the innermost ring (highest priority)
- 5 in the middle ring (medium priority)
- 11 in the outermost ring (lowest priority)
(Adjust the numbers as needed, but generally the number of items you can fit in each ring should exponentially increase, somewhat proportionate to the volume of that ring; this is one reason bullseye prioritization is so effective — it instantly and visually conveys the need to focus only on the most important items)
When the two groups came together, they compared their boards and were able to jointly come up with a revised board that had input from everyone.
Looking back on the results
After running the exercise, we realized a few key things about bullseye prioritization:
- It’s much faster: We ran the entire exercise in an hour — prioritizing 18 system improvements over multiple factors — with enough time for the 2 groups to come up with their own target boards AND synthesize those two boards into a single joint board. By using a single target board, the users could more fluidly rank while considering multiple factors, rather than methodically ranking against both axes each time. Also, by only ranking in tiers, the users didn’t need to rank each individual item against each other, making them work a lot faster.
- By extension, we were able to get through a large number of items: I haven’t seen a 2 x 2 survive with more than 10 items — but this bullseye diagram ranked 18 system improvements without breaking a sweat.
- It allows users to consider secondary factors rather than focusing them on just 2: We were able to focus on the key factors (improvements to processing time) while still considering other secondary factors (which are important, but not important enough to deserve their own axis on a 2x2). This is simultaneously the biggest drawback of a bullseye diagram — that you can’t systematically ensure how each person is prioritizing, and what factors they’re considering — that needs to be carefully facilitated during the discussion.
- The findings in both groups were consistent: The findings across both groups were remarkably consistent — which was something we haven’t noticed with 2 x 2 ranking exercises before this (where depending on the axis chosen and how the group interprets them — results could vary wildly).
And after we finished the exercise, we only needed to take the 7 prioritized system improvements from the 2 inner rings to our technical team (and yes, eventually, to weigh those different options, we did bring out the impact effort 2 x 2), but in a smaller group that was more used to performing that kind of prioritization.
TLDR
A 2 x 2 is still an incredibly versatile and powerful tool when you choose your axes right (such as in the case of impact/effort analysis). But let’s say you’re not ready to consider effort scores, and you need to get alignment quickly and with people who may not be so used to doing that kind of analysis (e.g. in a workshop setting) — consider bullseye prioritization.
