Value vs Effort Prioritization Method

[Music] what is up beautiful people welcome to another video in this one i'm going to show you how to use the value effort matrix to prioritize your actions i am sure i would have done something like this in the past in some of the previous videos but i'd like to focus specifically in this activity about on prioritizing actions using the value effort matrix some of you are familiar with it some of you are new to it so i'd just like to keep this simple let's get into my mural to explain further okay so previously in

the past few videos i've done a video about reviewing user feedback and prioritizing actions uh at the end of a design sprint and then i'm pretty sure it at that video someone asked me a question about uh how do you prioritize it using a value effort matrix so i wanted to show that to you in order to do that i've just created a couple of um to-do's here which is like a backlog of things that you would have as a team normally or even individually so let's just pretend some of our to do here is

to and let's imagine that we have a business or a a product a digital product or something like that an app that we're running and then there's a list of to-do's that we have as a team so the first one is brand identity redesign the second one is add feature x whatever that feature is create social media calendar uh integration with payment systems y uh instagram influencer outreach optimize dashboard ui for accessibility usability testing for ordering and checkout process expand into a separate product so as you can see there's a multiple there's a multitude type

of comments here comes from different departments you would see like some of these comments might come from a marketing person a marketing team member some of these comments might come in from a ui designer some of these comments might come in from the ceo himself or herself so we'll we'll try and prioritize this right the way to do it is you start a matrix that looks like this i like to go with a high value on the left hand side and low value at the bottom left low effort and high effort over the side so

some placeholder text that i've got here is when it's a high value item but it's low effort it's oftentimes a quick wins uh situation you basically want to do it first because it doesn't take much for you to complete it or achieve it but you know it could bring a lot of value to the company or the business so those are like low hanging fruit quick wins type of situation then you also have the high value stuff but it's a high effort uh thing to do so a team would have to go through a bunch

of things that just creates more it need it requires more time resources or you know whatever like to get it done basically it requires more effort and that's why i like to call this uh that's it's oftentimes an indication that it may be a major project so what you need to do is plan and schedule appropriately and the next category here is low value low effort um which is a fill in so uh it doesn't doesn't really matter if you if you execute it or not but often times you want to focus on the high

value stuff rather than the low value stuff so you can almost forget about this one and the next one that you can also forget most of the time is high effort low value so when it requires a lot of effort to complete but it actually doesn't bring a lot of value at all it's i call it the thankless tasks but you can almost you know don't worry about it too much you want to focus on the high value stuff so it's these ones up here that you want to focus on uh obviously this depends on

where in the in the calendar you're sitting which part of the year are you sitting how important because there are things that are low value now but it's actually high value later like a year later or so so let's try and just map this out let's grab brand identity readers and i'm doing this just for examples uh just for the purposes of this video but brand identity redesign oftentimes is a high effort thing so what i'd like to do is like start in the middle if i'm working with a team here i'd love i'd ask

if i'm facilitating this i'd go all right guys do you think this is high effort or low effort it doesn't matter where you start but just you know like guess what do you think uh and then someone will say all right like we think it's it's high effort so i'll move it here it's high effort uh it's potentially high value too so i'm just going to bring it here right uh move on to the next card add feature x let's just imagine this is something simple that our developer can do or our technical team member

can do it's high value but it's actually low effort so let's just drop them there create social media calendar that's going to be somewhere in between i would say so it goes between high effort and low effort so it's just mid effort in terms of value uh it probably sits around there integration with payment system y i'm just going to go with assumptions here because we don't know exactly what product this is but just for the purposes of this video i'm gonna drop it in uh the fill-ins because we believe it won't bring as much

effort uh sorry it won't bring as much value and it doesn't take long for us to do as well so let's just go there this could be a backlog item in the future instagram influencer outreach that sounds like a low effort thing but high value somewhere here all right let's go there optimize dashboard for ui accessibility that goes here maybe there and then usability testing for ordering checkout seems to be like a high i don't know like a low effort but high value or let's just say it's somewhere here in the mid expand into a

separate product now oftentimes this is something that you know one person might have or uh someone has an idea around this in a meeting table uh but for the purposes of this let's say you know what like our product is not ready to be expanded yet let's focus on optimizing it rather than expanding it's high value to be able to completely create a different product or a separate product so this becomes a high effort but low value thing for now so now that we have this we know what to focus on and we just go

by the fact that we're going to focus on the first bit which is quick wins because it's easy to do and we can get it done and it brings a lot of value what we want to do is assign owners to these tasks so i just did a copy there i copied add feature x instagram influencer outreach i'm ordering it from the left to right based on the high value row uh optimize dashboard create social media calendar usability testing and brand identity redesign as this is a bigger project i might even want to separate them

between the the small project and the big project based on this let's just say the first two are the small projects but they're high value right uh all right so what we want to do is uh we want to assign owners so in a team meeting i'd go okay add feature x who's going to own this uh oftentimes it could be like a product owner or something like that so this is i don't know like let's just go with jimmy jimmy is a product owner uh instagram influencer outreach that's our marketing coordinator uh her name

is lisa uh optimize dashboard for ui accessibility or at jimmy that's on you as well because you're the product owner and then jamie might have his own team in the background uh social media calendar lisa's going to do that usability testing we already know who our user researcher is and jamie's delegating it to someone else and this is jen uh brand identity design uh let's pass this on to lisa's supervisor who's the marketing director and he's gonna go and organize that with um the brand agency um who's the marketing director's name i don't know richard

all righty um so that's how you would prioritize and that's how you would assign owners and what i like to do at least for ourselves here in relab is to assign timelines or at least time frame so jimmy i'd bring it back to jimmy as a facilitator go jimmy how long do you think it'll take you to do this then jimmy will roughly estimate you know what maybe it'll be like four to six weeks not 406 weeks but four to six weeks lisa would do the same essentially this is when someone as a team member

will be held accountable on something but it's not really about you know you got to do it on that time but at least it gives you it sets expectation for the wider group influencer outreach uh sorry we're saying this is an easy one right so it's not going to be four to six weeks this is as a matter of fact will be done in two weeks time influencer outreach elisa says it can be done within one week optimize this and this is probably the thing that's going to be four to six weeks great social media

calendar lisa i think she needs a little bit of time there maybe give me four weeks jen says this like in plus recruitment and everything in terms of like getting a tester and all of that uh maybe another four weeks bren identity redesign richard says maybe next financial year all right so that's how you can assign tasks based on the priorities to owners uh and have something to look forward to as a team as well in a very structured way hopefully that makes a lot of sense and hopefully that's helpful for you and whatever practice

you're in i hope that's useful but otherwise if you know of any other tricks something like this let us know as well because i'm open to seeing what others are doing to in the space i'll leave it there please do like subscribe and share this video if you find it useful or if you wanted to share it with your team members and colleagues please do so too i hope they find it at least enjoyable too alright guys have a good one bye [Music] you