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Prioritisation: What are we going to do? And in what order?

From my experience, this is the most important section of this handbook. What is being worked on now HAS to be the thing that is more likely to turn the product into something people want. There should be no other feature that people are more keen to see.

Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort​

Working out the priorities of work is not a simple thing to rank, as each piece will have a number of factors. Various frameworks exist for quantifying these, and the RICE framework is one of the most effective. Using a simple calculation (spreadsheet linked below) we are able to balance the reach (how many users this will benefit), the impact (how much it will mean to them), the confidence (how sure are we that we can get it done) and the effort (the amount of time it will take to build).

Further reading: Product Plan have a great explainer, with videos and the Intercom blog on RICE is one of the most often cited intros.

Tooling to get started​

Intercom's example spreadsheet is a great starting point to doing this exercise.

Validating priorities​

End users are the main decision makers for priority. Regular sessions need to be conducted (weekly) to capture requirements and understand what the product is not doing.

Decide the absolute minimum set of functionality for a feature, then build on it​

When building KEY ESG, I saw that users had a shopping list of features they were looking for. To fulfil each of those needs to a high complexity required considerable work. However, many of them could be fulfilled in a much simplier form, then iterated to improve.

Signs of stuff that is low priority​

  • Can the functionality be achieved elsewhere in the app? Required functionality that's not in the app is more important than this.
  • Is it layout-related? Are you fine tuning CSS with no impact on functionality, yet your app is missing essential features?
  • Does it solve an actual need
  • Have people actually asked for it, or are you guessing they need it?

Signs you need to look for another job​

  • No input from actual users.
  • There is no clear decision maker for priority. If a co founder is not confident enough to do this, then they likely are out of their depth.
  • There are no regular meetings to ranking priorities.
  • The backlog is not sorted by priority.
  • Co founders regularly disagree on priorities.
  • CEO doesn't know or care what is being worked on each week.
  • A new idea comes up, and you have to drop everything to do this. Every. Single. Week.