How prioritization has gone wrong…
Product teams many times use prioritization to convince themselves that the features they build will be impactful. We create frameworks to give a false sense of security of future impact — impact that is impossible to estimate without upfront work (and by this, I mean product strategy and true experimentation). Before conducting any product discovery, we spend an immense amount of time identifying the one idea that will make the most impact, and then we, finally, test it. This is now NOT to prioritize.
Prioritization generally means gathering requests from various disciplines, from customers, and ideas from the team. Afterward, the product manager schedules a meeting or a series of meetings with their team (engineering, design, and other product managers) and stakeholders to estimate impact, reach, complexity, and the worst one of all, confidence. After hours of discussion, you might come up with a scored list or a 2x2 with typically “impact” and “effort” or “impact” and “confidence” as axes. The team picks up the top five things and starts the research. The biggest issue here is that, with the people in this room, we could only represent what matters for the business, and what matters for the business will never be achieved if it does not deliver value for the customer.
In many companies, the product person administers the backlog at the mercy of inputs from stakeholders. They are crippled from doing real product work. These companies care about velocity and features over impact and outcomes. This is you if these are the voices all around you that drive decision-making:
- From Sales: “if we had this, we could sell so much more.
- From Marketing: “our competitor is doing it; we need to do it.”
- From Engineering: “this is so cool — we need to build it.”
- From the CEO: “this is a brilliant idea. We must execute on it.”
- From Designers: “this would take our product to new heights.”
- From Product marketing: “we’re missing a market opportunity here by not building this”
- From Ops: “This could save us so much money.”
- From Customer success: “I know this one idea would solve all these requests.”
I start by saying that these are massive generalizations, but I have personally heard them all. Additionally, I have great colleagues in each of these disciplines with wonderful ideas. The point here is that they’re just ideas. Ideas are not framed to achieve an objective or solve user problems. They are opinions that we “the business” think are great, but we’re not the user.
I speak from experience since I have been this product manager before and have led many of these meetings where I hoped to rank ideas based on impact (business and customer value). Time and time again, they failed me. I learned to game the system- RICE, the scoring system that assesses reach, impact, confidence, and effort, was perfect for that. We would end up with the features that I thought were more important or knew more information as a team. We would not even discuss many features since we did not have enough data to “score” them. We’d end up with a very inward view of what mattered while the people determining our success were all outside the building. Most importantly, teams do not connect prioritization to product strategy and business goals despite the core purpose of the features being to drive what the business needs. Through my many mistakes, I have learned what not to do.
I’m not gonna leave you hanging… I’m developing a course on Prioritizing for Impact with Maven and am excited to share what I learned and share how to do it right. Interested? Join the waitlist!
Also, I’m going to be writing much more regularly. I’m planning on a new post every week (ambitious goal) so keep me to it! Next up will be the 5 pitfalls of prioritization!!!
