Building and prioritizing a product roadmap can get challenging. Every task appears critical, so how to prioritize or more importantly, how to de-prioritize and say no.
They say — “Refer 80/20 rule as 20% of items deliver 80% of the value”. But how to cheery pick those 20% items.
Three dimensions of project planning
Use lens of “thinking outside in”
The answer is to stop thinking from internal processes and delivery point of view. Analyze your business first from the customer’s perspective and subsequently from design processes, tools, and products, and then prioritize on what’s best for the customer and what meets the customer’s needs.
Sounds logical, but then ‘How to do it’?
Over the years, I figured a formula to prioritize the product roadmap, based on my learning while working with some wonderful minds. I want to share it, hoping you might it useful:
1. First manage uncertainties
In any project, there are always ‘unknowns’ i.e. stories where our devs are uncertain of the approach or the success. For example:
- Writing new algos
- Data wrangling
- Setting up new infrastructure
- Third-party integrations
- Implementing new user interaction or animation etc.
It’s always better to cater to stories with uncertainties first. You put something out early, so that if you fail (feature is a miss), then you can contain the amount of the efforts expended.
2. Skeleton UI for user feedback
After dealing with uncertainties, focus on desirability. Play the UI stories and develop the HTML/app pages.
When you put a working prototype in the user’s hands, you get actual feedback.
Ask your users to test these clickable pages with real-world data. This step is critical for mobile apps as they have limited screen real estate.
3. Data export
Now make the project functionally ready. Play stories to allow the users to export/download the data (if needed). Now users can test the integrity of their data and if needed, work offline in excels.
4. Complete Backend
Now make the project functionally done. Complete backend stories and ask your users to test the project end-to-end. At this stage, ask your users to focus on finding bugs and breaking the system.
5. Aesthetics
You can call a project shippable when it’s aesthetically done. Now pick the UI theming stories and make the UI slick. You can choose to ship (release) the project now.
6. Performance improvement
Now scale your project for your audience size. Test your project for a large number of users and fix your infra.
7. User/market testing
Your project is ready and live. Now, conduct user testing to improve usability and identify unfulfilled gaps.
8. Reiterate
A project is never perfect. Based on usability testing and market feedback, consider to do another round of the prioritization exercise.
Freebie wallpaper
Project Prioritization
Credits: I would like to thank Khushroo Cooper and Priyank Gupta. Pairing with them helped me to improve my prioritization skills.
