Hey Corinn here, creator of Speckled the tool that helps PMs build the
right thing at the right time.
Today we're going to talk about prioritization, why you need it,
how to do it, and some quick tips to make sure it goes smoothly.
So how do you prioritize what your team should work on?
What makes it onto the roadmap and what doesn't?
How do you develop your own prioritization process?
Well, prioritization is the one thing that you can do as a PM that
makes everything so much easier.
Implement it, and you'll find that you're a lot less frazzled by people
asking you to build things for them, which tends to happen a lot as a PM.
You also find that your team is more focused on what really
matters, and you can build a better product with less feature bloat.
So that sounds great, right?!
Well, before starting Speckled, I was a PM at a small software company.
We've received so many feature requests every week.
Everyone wanted something different and everyone thought that
their idea would be a home run.
Well, fortunately or unfortunately, we did try to build everything for
everyone and we quickly realized that it was darn near impossible.
As a PM, you simply don't have the time or energy to do that.
You have to prioritize.
And the good thing is it doesn't have to be fancy.
What you need is a way to figure out where an idea falls
in the grand scheme of things.
To do this, you'll create a simple prioritization process that you and
your team can use to assess new ideas.
So, putting together your own framework is easy.
Let's break it down into three steps.
The first one.
It's figure out what's important.
Prioritization is literally the, in the process of figuring out what's important.
So it makes sense that this is what we would do first.
And the good news is you probably have a pretty good idea of what
is important to you already.
You could find what's important by sifting through your OKRs, your
company vision, mission, its values.
Once you do that, and you have the list of three, four, five important
things to your company, we're going to use those as evaluation criteria
when it comes to prioritization.
So step two is to get your list of whatever you want to prioritize together.
So this could be things like feature requests, ideas, bug fixes,
whatever you got, and whether it's in Asana, JIRA, it's in Trello, it's
in a notebook, it's in your head.
We're going to get it all into one place, whether that's in a spreadsheet
or into Speckled, it's up to you.
We just want them all in some place where we can easily look at them
and evaluate them for step three.
Which is to score and rank all of your items on what's important to you.
So, you're going to go through each item and score it on your importance criteria.
For example, Speckled we're in the middle of building an MVP right now.
It's important to us that we can get things out fast, that the
things that we build are viable.
And that what we build actually activates users.
So those are the three things that are important to us.
So that's what we came up with in step one.
And step two, we have our list of what we want to prioritize.
So say for example, we're thinking about building a new onboarding tutorial.
That's going to take us three days.
It's going to have a high viability.
And we know that a lot of the users who are going to encounter it are going
to become activated because of it.
So we're going to score our onboarding and then we'll score
each of the other ideas on our list.
Now at the end, you'll find that you have an apples to apples comparison of what
is important to you, and you'll find that the best ideas may float to the top, and
there may be some ideas at the bottom that you're going to have to address and maybe
have some uncomfortable conversations and that'll be a video for another time.
But some pro tips in the meantime.
Try not to reprioritize anything last minute.
It just causes a little bit of chaos and it's, it's never good for anyone really.
So if you can avoid it, try not to reprioritize as much as you can.
And another thing is.
As a PM you don't get to prioritize whatever sounds the coolest to you.
You have to take the needs of everyone else first and make
sure that those are balanced.
Sure.
Your ideas can still go onto the roadmap, but just make sure that they
go through the same prioritization process as everyone else.
In this video, we covered how prioritization can save your sanity.
How to figure out what's important to you, how to score and rank your
list and why as a PM you can't just prioritize whatever the heck you want to.
So if you liked this content, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter
by heading to get speckled.com/beta.
Drop your email there and every Sunday we send out the top three product stories
of the week curated specifically for PM's at startups and small businesses.
And in the meantime, happy prioritizing.