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How to prioritise and make better product decisions
NOT another post about fancy frameworks or focusing on outcomes.
The vast amount of work we do leads to setting proper priorities. We tweak our strategy, research our customers, market, and competitors, evaluate trends and technical feasibility, facilitate conversations and secure buy-in, all to specify what to build next.
Your team’s time is the most precious resource a company has at its disposal, and if part of your job is to direct that time, you need to become great at it. It’s a craft, and one that you can deliberately get better at with practice.
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The question is, how do we make the process both efficient and effective.
I won’t give you a definitive answer or a new fancy framework. Prioritisation is a subtle combination of art and science that’s heavily context-depended. Instead, let’s focus on a set of high-level principles that should fit most contexts. The way we approach prioritisation is more important than the tool or framework we use.
Principle 1. Align priorities with strategy as a whole — not only objectives.
Our decisions must be aligned with strategy; goals are not enough.
Don’t get me wrong. Correctly set objectives should be our prioritisation magnets, and if we hit them — this is why we selected them in the first place. However, objectives are sometimes not enough to cover our strategy holistically. Let’s look at a few areas that sometimes slip if we focus too narrowly on specific goals.
Example 1: Engine of Growth
Our growth engine should run as efficiently as possible. If our strategy is to build a user base through virality, we must keep that in mind. Say our current goal is to drive engagement, and we are faced with two competing alternatives.
- Feature A: Expected to drive engagement by 20%.
- Feature B: Expected to drive engagement by 25%.
Looking purely from an objectives standpoint, feature B it is. However, if we also include our growth engine as a factor, it might look more like this:
