You don’t have a prioritisation problem, you have a strategy problem

I often find where places struggle with prioritization it’s not a ‘prioritization’ problem per se, but rather a strategy one.

Either their product or organization strategy is vague or missing. Or they’re misaligned creating friction between the product and organization goals.

Poor strategy or lack thereof turns prioritization into a corporate version of the Hunger Games where stakeholders all jump up-and-down, shouting why their thing is the most important and either the loudest or the HIPPO effect prevails.

The problem here is that we all have good ideas. There is no shortage of great ideas and things we would like to do. When we view prioritization as a single-layer activity we are stuck trying to compare apples to oranges and trying to prioritize a million different ideas at once.

Prioritization as Layers

The first step before looking to prioritize anything is to define your strategy.

A strategy is a set of choices, not a roadmap, nor a vision or a prioritised list of features.

These are choices to do something, to be something, etc. And every time you make a choice to do-or-be something, you are also making a decision NOT to be-or-do something.

Without this clarity on what you are doing and why, prioritization becomes hugely subjective, unfocused, and lacking any sort of rigor — and no RICE formula or spreadsheet will help you get out of this void.

Albert Einstein has been attributed to saying, “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”

You can think of Prioritization this way. You’re much better off spending 55 minutes nailing your strategy, and defining the outcomes before even attempting to prioritize ideas, solutions and features.

As a result, Prioritization is really a multi-faceted activity.

For example, choosing to expand your product internationally is a good starting point, and you can see how this already begins to make prioritisation easier as you can now focus on work that aligns with international expansion.

But choosing to expand internationally in Western-European countries, or better yet, into Germany, France and the Netherlands, is even better. Any work that doesn’t advance us towards that clear and specific goal is out of the question.

This is really where you need to start in terms of your product and prioritization. First prioritize where you strategically want to take your product — what markets are you going to prioritize tackling first? Who within those markets will you target and why? — and prioritizing the opportunities and ideas within that strategy last.

Thus prioritization should really be seen as a set of layers where:

1. You need to prioritise your goals first.
2. Then look at where you want to play and where you will not play to achieve that goal — target markets, etc.
3. Next you prioritise opportunities and short-term outcomes within that playing field.
4. And ideas, solutions and features last.

Prioritization shouldn’t be hard. It’s only made hard by skipping critical steps and jumping straight to attempting to prioritize a long list of ideas, features and backlog items.

The next time you’re confronted with prioritizing a long list of features and ideas take a few steps back and consider whether these ideas align to your current goals and strategy — don’t have them? Then invest time into setting one.

It’s much easier to prioritise a handful of goals, and then a handful of opportunities within that goal, as opposed to attempting to prioritise 100s of backlog items.