Find the right way to prioritize
by Daniel Zacarias originally published on Foldingburritos.com
Prioritization is a top concern for most Product Managers. It’s by far one of the most popular topics on PM blogs, Q&A sites, and other online communities.
Although it’s not what we are hired to do, it’s something that we have to do to achieve our real goal: creating successful products that bring value to our customers and to the business.
The need to prioritize comes from a very simple fact: we just don’t have enough resources to work on everything we can come up with.
Thus, we need a process to determine the sets (and sequence) of things that should be done on the product to deliver the most value at each point in time, given our constraints.
If we break this statement down, a core group of questions then need to be answered:
- How can we know what’s valuable? How valuable is it? Valuable to whom?
- How can we define the set of things that should go together in a product release? How should we sequence those releases?
- How can we get the necessary buy-in to follow through and get these things to the market?
- How can we know if our assumptions are right? Are we on the right track? Are we really delivering value? Could we do any better?
What this guide is all about
If you search around, you’ll find countless articles with recommendations, techniques and approaches to this very hard problem. However, each method’s usefulness will depend on the specific product or project where it’s applied. Your prioritization needs may vary vastly.
Here’s what you will get from this guide covering 20 popular product prioritization techniques:
- A map, in the form of a Periodic Table to help you make sense of what each technique has to offer;
- An overview of each method, with graphics and links to more in-depth resources;
- 5 commonalities and takeaways from all these methods.
The Periodic Table of Product Prioritization Techniques
When I started working on this guide, I immediately felt the need to visually organize all of these techniques in a way that made sense and showed the context in which each of them is valuable.
Too read the full article with original images, see Foldingburritos.com
Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn, see what he has to say on Twitter.
Figure out how to make your product more valuable!
Join online course on Product Management Essentials. This Online course is a combination of lectures on best practices, exercises, and discussions. The goal is to give you tools that help you:
- Balance multiple, competing priorities
- Organize your roadmap and backlog
- Reduce the time spent on writing specs
- Collaborate and create alignment with stakeholders
- Communicate your goals and progress with the rest of the company
About Daniel Zacarias
Daniel Zacarias is a Senior PM consultant based in Lisbon, helping teams create or improve their product strategies and processes.Over the last 10 years, he’s been an Engineer, Product Owner and Product Manager in the Finance, Mobility, Education and Social media industries.
About Productized Masterclasses
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