Top 4 Prioritization techniques in Product Management explained simply

[Music] hello everyone welcome to my channel untrapping product teams today i want to talk to you about one of the worst nightmares of product owners and product managers this is prioritization and why is that so challenging honestly for me this is stressful demanding and it can't suck my soul out of me an issue with prioritization is if you don't do it in a meaningful way you cannot get a good result simple like that right good things come in good things come out and what is so complex on that generally prioritization is happening based on some

animals and one of them is a hippo highest paid personal opinion and you don't want to do that unless you want to fail if you want to fail your prioritize based on this animal but if you want to do it correctly i'm gonna give you four techniques that will help you prioritize in a meaningful way two based on scoring one on a matrix and a classic one before i jump into the techniques there's something very important to tell you don't jump into prioritizations if you don't know where you want to be you need to have

a goal to pursue a vision whatever you need to have clarity on what you are fighting for if you don't know that whatever you're gonna prioritize it's just based on guesses so first set a meaningful product vision or a product goal you need to have something to answer this question if we're gonna do that we would get us closer to our goal and if the answer is no don't even bother talking about it so first create a vision and then you can talk about prioritization now let's talk about the techniques i want to start with

two scoring techniques rice and ice the first one is rice it is not food here we are talking about the scoring model and this one is about going through the whole backlogs or epics or ideas whatever level you want to take i prefer taking on the highest level possible because if you're talking about the backlog it means we have already invested time on creating items for the backlog what the hell am i talking about imagine you want to implement the solution an epic is a high level and when you're talking about the product backlog item

it's very low level we don't want to waste time on this so rice stands for are means rich how many people do you expect to reach with your potential solution and once you implement that what is the impact you expect to achieve what is going to make with the end users lives and c stands for confidence how confident are you that you can reach the expected result and e comes to f4 how long it's going to take to make this solution live in a pod environment and then use this formula you come up with a

number and you prioritize by the highest price scoring so you can see that there is a technique there's logic behind and so on the thing is this is going to take quite a lot of time you need to involve a lot of people and at the end of the day it is highly opinionated okay but let's not stick to that right now let's go to the other technique called ice ice is a little bit similar to rice but a little less complex can be faster and eyes the eye stands for impact what do you expect

to cause with your potential solution and c confidence same question how confident are you that that can really happen and e in this case is easiness of implementation while rise is the effort here is the easiness and then you have a formula as you can see you make a calculation comes with a magic number and boom you decide upon what to do you see these are very prescriptive they are a process you follow them and then you prioritize it's better than nothing but can be quite consuming now i want to give you a simple one

and this is my favorite i like creating a matrix and the magic of a matrix is you can choose what makes sense for you and your situation what i like using is you take the expected outcome and then you take the easiness of implementation and you just rank together with your stakeholders and so on and here it is really based on your gut feeling because this is what prioritization is about once you have the vision and you can say what goes in and what goes out you take the items that are potential for that and

you decide where to put them and what is the magic of a matrix it will make it easier for you to understand to make decisions let's take an example as i said when you look at these metrics here you have four quadrants and if you say that something is low expected outcome and it's hard to implement oh boy this is a time waster you know you're gonna put a lot of effort on that and still you may not get anything from that the only reason you would invest any time on that it's if the impact

of not doing that can hurt the business dramatically so that would be something legal something that can cause a negative impact on the business that is the only reason you would invest time on these squadrons the time wasters now we have other three quadrants let's just have a look at them if you look at super easy to implement but i expected a low outcome this is what i call as nice to have and what is the trap here nice you have can consume a lot of time if you try to do everything but they don't

generate value and then we put our energy here and we are surprised by the end of the month that we didn't really cause an impact so be mindful about it and now we have what i call as bats they may generate high impact but still they are hard to implement in this case you should be aware that it will take you time to benefit from this solution and now i want to talk about my favorite ones the low low-hanging fruits the low-hanging fruits are high expected outcome and easy to implement once you identify this then

you are fulfilling your mission as a product professional why what is your mission maximizing the value and this is where you could put your energy [Music] now let's come to our last technique this is a classic one it's called moscow i guess you have heard about it it is not the captain of russia this is a technique it fosters collaboration let's say like this you have a goal and then you want to ensure you achieve that goal if you put the latter's muscle on a wall m stands for have and what is a must-have it's

something that without that there's no single chance you are going to reach your goal should have what is that it is something that is very important to reach the goal but yet you can get there without it this would be a compromise something that may reduce the quality of your system for example usability or maybe performance but still you can get to the go so it means it's not part of your mvp and then it comes it could have this is the famous knife you have it is something that is like the cherry on the

top of the cake you don't need that it makes beautiful maybe someone will even remember that but most of the people will just ignore it so good halves are things that will be done only if you have a lot of time and the last one is the want have and this is very important because you agree what you are not gonna develop for your product what is not part of that it is equally important to the things that are part of your product is this you set clear expectation with your stakeholders so i've just given

you four techniques there are many others to summarize everything about prioritization for me it is about collaboration so this is everything related to agile we want to ensure we collaborate and we accept our ignorance we don't know everything upfront and we don't need to know we need to have an idea where we want to go and commit to the progress there so i like simplicity i don't really like rice i don't like ice because they are complex and they are time consuming why do i like the metrics because it fosters collaboration i get around with

the people i need and then we agree on which quadrants to put the items we want to pursue and then we can make the prioritization easier because honestly prioritization is just a gas it's a game so make the game simple don't try to over engineer that you don't really need having a bias toward action is what will help you deliver value sooner hopefully this video has given you an idea on how to simplify prioritization if you enjoy it just hit the like button and if you want to get more videos like this subscribe for more

thank you for watching