Prioritizing When Everything is a Priority
The hard routine of who has a lifetime pipeline of projects, and only six hours a day to execute them
Putting aside the common qualities a professional must have (clear communication, punctuality, keeping updated, etc), when someone asks me about what makes a great product manager, my answer, in general, is directed to only one characteristic:
a great product manager is good in prioritizing
All other skills and techniques are secondary. It does not matter if you draw the best Gantt charts when the projects you choose to execute are no the most relevant.
Good prioritizing requires knowledge about your customers’ needs and gives the best in productivity to your development team and company.
Aligning Strategy and Execution
It all starts by having a great understanding of the company goals and acknowledging all the interests behind all projects. And that is why all product managers describe themselves as the connection between development and the “outside world”.
In this post, we want to exercise the practicals that will help you to choose the projects execution order. We will not only discuss those cliches as focus on the goals, or plan ahead, or talk to your customers and bla bla bla.
Before deep dive in those techniques, the first step is to master the three concepts below.
Technical debt
Writing “good code” is expensive but it creates efficiency in the future. Each new project demands it’s own amount of “good code”, and if you fail to deliver it you increase your technical debt that will need to be paid in the future, otherwise you can go “coderuptcy”.
Technical debts can be recognized as bugs coming frequently or a decrease in team development speed even for small tasks.
For small teams and companies, work without creating any technical debt may cost the business life. Balance is key. Your job as a product manager is to handle the increases and decreases of this debt, in order to move fast when needed but slower to fix stuff at the right time.
It may seem that technical debt and prioritization are two separate discussions, but when technical debt reaches high levels it starts to impact the pipeline decisions you make because of the effort to complete some tasks changes too.
Your company is a closed system
One of the most iconic battles inside tech companies are the ones between tech and sales teams. It is a long relationship. Despite all people think we must not work to put an end to those battles, but we must work to create a relationship of truce where teams (sales, operations, customer service or any other) fight for what they believe keeping a good relationship with each other.
It is the sales team, for example, who looks outside the company walls and maximize the number of growth opportunities. It is the technical team who guarantees the product is the best one available. It is your job, as the product manager and intermediator of those battles, to conciliate both interests.
Blocking features
It is wrong to consider blocking tasks as separated projects. As a project manager, you must always look at the final result. If there is any task blocking a project to be developed, you must add the project as part of the cost for implementation.
Choosing Based on Opportunity
Dedicate a great part of your days to understand the cost-opportunity for each project in the pipeline. It is like the economic definition for cost-benefit:
Between all the opportunities I have right now and the necessary effort to achieve them, which one are feseable and generates more value?
If you are new at dealing with this mindset, try to use a principle called Pareto. It is a principle that can guide your leverage until you create more sophisticated ways and instincts to measure effort and opportunity.
An example of how to apply the Pareto principle is using the formula described below:
Effort = Cost / (Cost + Opportunity)
To start, create a table with the next projects in your pipeline. If you have a huge list try to cut down your backlog. After listing, give a score from 1 to 10 both for cost and opportunity.
In the end, divide the cost score to the sum of cost and opportunity. The number you get is like the amount of effort you need compared to the total return. Probably, the lower effort amount is indicating the next project.
The term probably is used because the technique above is a shortcut, it is not considering all external facts. For example, projects 3 and 5 are pretty close in their effort scores (43% and 44% respectively). If project 5 has an important launch release date, putting this project first is the right choice.
Be careful: cost is not only the time your team needs to develop a project but the total resources and complications you need to handle to execute the project (time, people, complexity, amount of applications impacted, etc). Remember to do not spend time creating polished planning for each of your pipeline projects, it needs to be just an overviewed score.
Go For Core Features
Jumping stairs a step at a time is easy and simples, but jumping all steps at the same time is hard and requires some skills. The same concept applies to projects: planning and executing big projects is hard and requires skill to minimize errors and deviations.
It is always smart to breakdown projects before prioritizing. After breaking it down, prioritize the features that solve the core problems by using the same table we saw in this post.
Let the fancy and smart features to the end, go for the core features. It is going to deliver the value you need and sometimes the other steps will not be necessary anymore.
In case of projects or tasks with same effort scores, ask yourself:
Which project has a specific deadline?
Which project impacts more people?
Which project makes it easier to build new things in the future?
Which project delivers more value faster?
Which project makes me closer to this market?
Use the questions above always between two projects. The one you most choose as an answer is the first to be executed.
This formula is not bullet-proof, and you are going to make mistakes.
If you have years ahead planning projects and it didn’t happen, first of all, congratulations. But, I invite you to reflect on the amount of effort you put to prepare yourself to prioritize.
There is a Chinese proverb that says: if your sales team is achieving 100% conversion, it means you are missing potential clients out there.
It is true because it means that the sales team is only talking to customers they already know they are going to acquire the product. The same happens here. If you are making mistakes sometimes, it may be because you missed something in your planning stage.
And that is ok! It is expensive to have an idle team waiting for you, or helping you to critically plan the next projects.
Good prioritizing is optimizing the opportunities for your business. Optimizing execution and cost is a second stage to be discussed not in the prioritization, but during project execution.