Prioritization matrix with Vizydrop and Trello

Hello, makers and creators. I bet everybody who was(is) involved in building products knows something about prioritization matrix. I am not going to explain in details how it works or give judgments about how it‘s important for creating great or not great ;) products, is it helpful or useless for choosing things to implement. I would like to show how to create mentioned visualization using Vizydrop.

Requirements to your features list

Some requirements related to your features list (backlog) needed to be handled before we proceed to most exciting part of creating the awesome chart. As you probably know most simple income, and we are going to start with it, for building prioritization matrix consists of:

1. The list of your unique features supposed to be implemented in the future. It can be named as epics or stories and etc. since a lot of terms are existing, and I am going to use “feature” term in this article. This list, by the way, called “backlog” sometimes, usually comes from product owner clever mind.
2. Features can have many statuses. All these states can be grouped into three main GTD groups: “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Done”. There is no much sense to prioritize features which are already in progress or done. So we should keep in mind that we are going to focus on “To Do” items excluding “In Progress” and “Done”.
3. Every feature in the list should have two numbers assigned — “User Value” and “Effort”. User value is about how much user wants the feature (figuring out that can be a bit tricky). The effort is about how much effort should be applied by the organization to get the feature done. Usually, product owner and the team are responsible to figure out these numbers using their experience in the domain and development.

Connecting data source to Vizydrop

We need to have the data be presented in Vizydrop. We may do that with using of the file, link or some apps implemented in Vizydrop. So it is not a big deal to have dataset be imported. I will use my Trello board, but you may find this article useful to build custom data link in case you are using some other work management tool then Trello. This is my board with two full-filled custom fields effort (days) and user value (%) in every feature.

I use cards source of Trello app to connect my features list with Vizydrop and selecting “Blank” template since I am going to configure chart from scratch.

Creating Chart

Now let’s proceed to chart creation by clicking [Create] chart button.

1. Let’s drop User Value (%) into Y-axis.

2. Proceed with X-axis configuration by dropping Effort into it.

3. I propose to drop Count of Records into size to see how much records are appeared into the same location.

4. Let’s drop feature name into Label and change the calculation to TEXT_AGG([Name]) to see what features exactly are in every point.

5. Let’s exclude features which are in progress and done. So I open data panel by pressing [Browse and filter] button and set to process data from To Do list only.

So the final configuration of the chart looks like

Y: [User Value (%)]
X: [Effort (Days)]
Size: Count of Records
Label: TEXT_AGG([Name])
Filter: [List] is in "To Do"

6. Now let’s add some annotation lines required for prioritization matrix:

• 50% annotation line into Y-axis
• AVG([Effort (Days)]) into X-axis

Finally, we get the following chart. Four squares can be found mentally and experts suggest to see it in a special way.

Live version

Thanks for attention dear friends and please let us know about your thoughts.