Product Feature Prioritization | Each PM Must Know

Prioritization Mean?

• Prioritization means organizing things so that the most important thing is done or dealt with first.
• Ultimately, our aim is to create successful products by answering two seemingly simple questions: what to build and when?
• You’ll be able to focus on the right things by visualizing the importance of each initiative and feature. Ultimately this will help you to make high-impact prioritization and tradeoff decisions.

“The Main Thing Is To Keep The Main Thing The Main Thing !!!”

Why Prioritization? Can’t go with Guesswork?

• It will allow you to see the big picture and set the right priorities.
• If you prioritize poorly, your business will sink faster than the Titanic, just as we saw with Kodak and Blockbuster. This means that prioritization isn’t a goal, it’s a continuous process.
• That is why prioritization should be the highest priority for product managers everywhere. A good prioritization framework and decision-making process set a clear route towards your goals.

Prioritization Techniques

• Popularity shouldn’t drive your choice of prioritization frameworks. There are no wrong prioritization frameworks. It purely depends, which techniques work for you the best? And how to decide that depends on several factors (Complexity of product, Product implementation stage, Team size/maturity, Organisation culture, etc.)

Reference is taken from ProductPlan.com

A) MoSCoW Method

The MoSCoW method is one of the most popular prioritization techniques to establish what is most important to clients and stakeholders.

Advantages:

• Great involvement of business-side stakeholders in the feature prioritization process.
• Powerful and easy way to prioritize.

Drawbacks:

• Not scalable for large size of requirements.
• Doesn’t take the “big picture” into account.

B) Impact / Effort Matrix

This is one of the easiest matrices for fast and transparent prioritization. allows teams to assess their initiatives based on how much value they will bring and how difficult they’ll be to implement.

• High Impact / Low Effort= Easy Win.
• High Impact / High Effort= Big Bets (Strategic)
• Low Impact / Low Effort= Incremental (May be later)
• Low Impact / High Effort= Money Pit (Cut this items)

C) 100 $ Method / 100 Points Method

• In this method, all client representatives are given an imaginary sum of 100 dollars or 100 points. These are to be distributed among the listed requirements.
• The requirements that have been allocated a higher amount on a ratio basis are considered within the application scope. The other requirements are postponed for future releases.

D) Walking Skeleton

• The Walking Skeleton method is one of the best prioritization techniques to rank features for a minimum viable product (MVP).
• More information can be found here

E) Other methods

There are many more methods/techniques,

• Weighted Scoring
• RICE
• KANO
• Priority Pocker

Conclusion

• The frameworks above are just a sample of the many options product managers have to select from. And many teams use multiple frameworks, utilizing different methods for various situations or mixing things up periodically to get a fresh take.
• NO Silver bullet — Nothing right/wrong. Choose what works for you and your organization.
• It’s always exciting to build new products and features, but it’s not always easy to bring ideas to life. Using the appropriate product feature prioritization methods discussed above, you can concentrate on your long-term strategy and not get distracted by short-term benefits.