Prioritization of Software Builds
There are two types of prioritization. The first is at a strategic level, deciding which features a product needs and why. The second is at a more tactical level. When we build new functionality, how do we deliver it to maximize value for stakeholders and users? How do we sequence and organize the iterative build of the feature and solution?
We’ll delve into the prioritization of building a thing in a subsequent blog post. Here we are going to focus on the more strategic level.
What do we really mean by “Strategic Prioritization”?
It could mean the new enhancements a product needs or a complete re-platform of a product. It could even mean which product line gets more teams allocated than another. Strategic prioritization is the what and why of the big picture. Tactical prioritization, as was mentioned, is really all about how something gets delivered.
Answering the $64,000 Question…
When trying to build insight into strategic prioritization, it’s important to answer a few questions first:
- In our market, what makes a product competitive?
- What are our competitors doing?
- What can we afford to do?
- What do we need to do to get ahead or stay ahead?
- What are the current user demands and trends for our product?
- What do we care about as a company?
- How important is clean code that’s easy to modify and move to production?
- Low running costs? Enterprise reusability?
Knowing these pressures and answering these questions are really at the core of how to prioritize. It helps teams focus on delivering value to the company and the products they are working on.
One of the best ways to get those questions answered is the $100 method. It’s a way of giving everyone a voice in the process and allows you to collectively understand what’s important across a team or company.
Each stakeholder is given a notional $100 to spend on whatever (feature, enhancement, or work item) they feel is important. There are no limits on how they spend. They can spend $100 on a single item, or $1 on 100 items. The team needs to decide on all the projects, initiatives, and products that they want to work on ahead of time and provide a short summary of each that stakeholders can vote on. This approach works well when combined with the more traditional market research and data analytics.
After all the votes are in, you should have a clear picture of what the team feels is important. The reason it’s helpful is that people often forget that resources are limited. Whether it’s hours in the day, or teams available to help, they need to remember that resources are always limited. By restricting their ability to have everything, it can help highlight what really matters.
The most important piece in all of this is that you need to have a clear understanding of the market, the pressures on your business, your competitors, and your roadmap before you can start this exercise. Ippon’s product consultant team are experts that can help you build and develop your list of priorities, help identify those pressures, and get your team firing on all cylinders. We do this by conducting market research and internal team workshops to help highlight what’s important to a company or product. Take a look at some of our case studies and how we’ve aided other companies in executing and identifying what mattered to them.
