A visual guide and survey of prioritization techniques. Trying to summarize foldingburritos.com framework in 25 minutes.

1. 20 Product Prioritization
techniques

2. What can be prioritized?
• Outcomes
• Problems
• Themes
• Features
• Risk
Can’t prioritize an idea you didn’t have
Invalidating ideas (removing them) is more useful than prioritizing them.

3. http://foldingburritos.com
Most excellent guide! (45 pages)
You < Team < Stakeholders < Customers

4. Quantitative and External - Kano
Axes:
Satisfaction vs. Completion/Functionality
Insight:
Customer responses are not symmetrical on
a feature. Provides a methodology to figure
out which category a feature falls in.

5. Quantitative and External - Kano

6. Quantitative and External - Kano
Axes:
Satisfaction vs. Completion/Functionality
Insight:
Customer responses are not symmetrical on
a feature. Provides a methodology to figure
out which category a feature falls in.
When to use:
Replicating an older product.
Finding an adjoining market to pivot off.
Delighters important for virality.
Challenges:
iPhone 1 – No copy/paste. No App store

7. Quant & Ext. – Quality Function Deployment
Axes: Prioritized Need to Spec, Needs to
Organization.
Insight: Customer needs to technical
specifications clearly expressed.
Other stakeholders accounted for
Can be expressed on a single page
When to use:
Mapping customer needs onto the
organization.
Hardware products, Engineering based
teams, Marketing and Sales alignment
Challenges:
Office supplies run out of graph paper

8. Quant & Ext. – Opportunity scoring
Outcome Driven Innovation

9. Quant & Ext – Opportunity scoring
Axes: Satisfaction vs. Importance
Similar to Kano(S,I) and QFD (I)
Insight:
Overserved is commoditized. Reduce cost
Underserved is innovation
When to use:
Legacy product strategy
Looking for growth
Looking for feature reduction
Easily done as surveys
Challenges:
Establishing the right level of question.
Creating a job map.

10. Quant & Ext(?). – Buy a feature
Axes: Features cost and Stakeholders
Insight:
Have a discussion in context with other
features and stakeholders.
Feature cost matters.
When to use:
Can be done remotely with chat.
Non-tech folks begin to question the cost of
‘simple’ features if used in conjunction with
planning poker.
Can replace shuttle diplomacy.
Challenges:
Getting everyone together.
Common understanding of the
feature/outcome.

11. Qualitative & External.

12. Qualitative & Ext. – Story Mapping
Axes: User Task vs. Feature
completeness (Connect 4)
Insight:
The customer journey needs to be
considered instead of features in
isolation.
When to use:
In combination with UX and
ethnographic techniques.
Gaps in current products
Product phasing, Lean, MVP.
Challenges:
Figuring out the user tasks.
Note:
Contrast with Kano, theme
prioritization
Jeff Patton

13. Qualitative & Ext. - MoSCoW
• Must Have
• Should Have
• Could Have
• Won’t Have

14. Qualitative & Ext. - MoSCoW
• Must Have
• Should Have
• Could Have
• Won’t Have

15. Qualitative & Ext. – Prune the Product tree
Axes: Time and categories/themes
Insight:
Visualizing growth in a tree is easier than visualizing
features on a timeline
When to use:
Discuss priorities without hard numbers or
deadlines.
Identify areas of low growth. Agree on areas of
growth. What are the branches?
Challenges:
Sticky notes fall.

16. Qualitative & Ext. – Speed Boat
Axes: Satisfaction (?) Annoyance (?)
Insight:
People feel comfortable expressing opinions in a
gamified fashion.
Black hat thinking.
When to use:
Deadlock. Sensitive topics.
Risk prioritization
Replaces: What are the top five improvements
you would like to see.
Challenges: Conflates importance, satisfaction
and annoyance.
Compare with ODI and Kano.

17. Quantitative & Ext. Takeaways
• Overall product shape instead of
individual features
• Strategic direction

18. Qualitative & Internal– Classification ranking

19. Qualitative & Internal – Stacked ranking
Axes: Importance
Insight:
One simple prioritized list is all we can manage.
I’m an expert - just do what I say.
When to use:
Pragmatic.
Large distributed development teams.
Waterfall projects
Schedule is important.
Challenges:
Being right.

20. Qualitative & Internal– KJ Method
• Group voting
• Individual sticky notes
• Group similar items
• Vote for importance.
Axes: Groups vs. Ranking
Insight:
People reach informed group consenus better
and faster when they have access to other
people’s thoughts.
When to use:
Large diverse groups
Time bound
Challenges:
Voting could be subjective if objective is not
clearly defined.
Self-censorship.
Assumed limitations.

21. Qualitative & Internal– Feature Buckets
Metrics
Movers
Customer
Requests
Delight Strategic
Pay the bills Don’t
alienate the
customer or
miss key
insights
Inspire
loyalty and
passion in
users
Experiment
Collect Data
Axes: Four KPIs
Insight:
Balance long term revenue over short term
revenue.
Move multiple KPIs
When to use:
Balanced major monolithic releases.
Evaluate on schedule overruns.
Forces clarity on why the feature was included.
Challenges:
Still need to prioritize within the bucket.
Be clear about why a feature is being done.

22. Qualitative & Internal– Systemico Model
Prioritized goals
Userengagement
Axes: Goals and Engagement
Insight:
Deliver core value quickly
Not just cost and schedule – also engagement
Each level generates validated learning
Value is not holistic and non-linear.
When to use:
Too much focus on what story costs and not on
other dimensions.
Visually show which areas are in focus.
Lean and broad product.
Challenges:
Hard to classify stories into user engagement
level
Compare to:
Story mapping

23. Quant & Int. – Financial Analysis
• New Revenue – New income.
• Incremental Revenue – upgrade or additional services.
• Retained Revenue - income not lost (customer churn is reduced).
• Cost Savings: Any type of operational efficiency gained within
company.
Increase revenue vs. Increase Margin
- Net Present Value (Discount Cash Flow. Compare against opp. cost)
- Internal Rate of Return (Compare against projects)
- Discounted Payback Period (How long till investment is recovered)
Do it.
Challenges: Lots of factors make it hard to track forecast vs. actuals.

24. Quant & Int. – Ian McAllister’s framework
• Director @ AirBnB
• Prioritize themes (KPIs – AAAR,
revenue, visits/user, etc.) first. Then
projects within.
• Sequence and resource your
themes
• Generate ideas. BIGGER ideas.
smaller projects (first 20% delivers
80% impact)
• Estimate impact, Estimate cost
• Prioritize within each theme
Axes: Theme/KPI and Project
Insight:
Resources allocated to themes explicitly
Resolves prioritization conflicts between apples
and oranges (500ms latency, 5K new users)
Forces modelling of impact. Hones product
sense.
When to use:
The KPIs are not clear or prioritized.
Too many disparate competing features and
projects (Portfolio prioritization)
Continuous resource contentions.
Challenges: These are strategy guidelines.

25. Quant & Int. – Impact on business goal
• Acquisition: users come to the site
product;
• Activation: users enjoy 1st visit,
signup;
• Retention: users come back
multiple times;
• Revenue: users’ activity leads to
revenue for the product;
• Referral: users like product enough
to recommend to others.
Axes: KPI and Feature
Insight:
Figure out which KPI to improve. Then validate
the improvement.
When to use:
Lean Startup
Challenges:
Strategy guideline.
Cycle time can be long if traditional large
company.

26. Quant & Int. – Value vs. Cost
Axes: Value and Effort/Cost
Insight:
Effort matters
When to use:
Always (?)
Challenges:
Can end up doing only low value work.
Both Value and Cost can drift.
Determining value (Pair with opportunity scoring)

27. Quant & Int. – Value vs. Risk
Axes: Value and Risk
Insight:
Risk covers the extremes of Cost
When to use:
New ventures, New Technology
Challenges:
Hard to estimate.
Note:
Combine with previous
- Pessimistic value
- Pessimistic effort.

28. Quant & Int. – Scorecard
Axes: Criteria and Feature
Insight:
Features are not one dimensional. They have
cost, benefit, risk, strategic value, portfolio value,
number of customer requests, lost deals, etc.
When to use:
Drive a discussion of what KPIs are important.
Consolidate stakeholders.
Challenges:
The right criterion?
Are weights cooked?
Fragmented products – no shared understanding.
Don’t avoid a product strategy discussion
Don’t avoid the organizational dysfunction
discussion.
http://blog.cauvin.org/2015/08/why-spreadsheets-suck-for-prioritizing.html

29. Quant & Int. – Theme screening/Relative
screening. Axes: Feature and Criteria
Insight:
Assigning a relative number is easier than an
absolute number
When to use:
When it’s easier to compare than quantify
Challenges:
Picking baseline that’s easy to compare against.

30. Takeaways
• External > Internal. (Get out of the building)
• Drive alignment – Identify the KPI/Strategy. Revenue is king.
• Split into themes, buckets if you cannot prioritize across them.
• Think holisitically – the customer journey and overall product shape.
• Align features with organizational capability
• Figure out what prioritization is being discussed (outcomes, problems,
themes, features, risk)
• Customer responses are non symmetrical.
• Find overserved and underserved areas
• Use a relative baseline if absolute rankings are not possible