How to Prioritize Your Product Roadmap -2

This is a follow up on last post “how to prioritize your product roadmap”. I want to do this second post because I find in real life, many people still prioritize features, not their stories. So I think it’s worth of talking about this point again.

The reason product managers write a PRD is to explicitly document what we want to build. The reason we build things is to solve our user’s pain point. So, the reason we write a PRD has to support that argument which is we need to solve our users’ pain points.

When doing prioritization, it’s easy for PM to focus on prioritizing features, for example, do this, don’t do that, do this first, do that later on, etc. But this prioritization only matters when the outcome impacts user’s pain point. If not, then prioritization is just shuffling feature, based on implementation difficulty.

So actually, the most important prioritization is to prioritize your user stories: why and what capability you want to offer to your users to help them solve their problems. That’s the key of prioritization. If you offer too little, your users cannot do much and therefore won’t benefit from your solutions. If you offer too much, your users might wait too long or you might over engineering and therefore create a more complicated solution than they really need.

So the PRD is the reflection of this prioritization process — to solve users’ pain point, this is what we want to build. This comes first, because this impacts users most. This could come later because customers can wait or customers don’t need it immediately.

So don’t do feature prioritization. Always prioritize your user stories.