Initiative prioritization tool

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Social Share on Social. Ask your participants in this case, your customers to write some potential features on sticky notes. These will be the leaves of your tree. By asking customers to place their desired features on the tree, you can identify the biggest clusters or branches. This will allow you to determine which areas of your product need more work, which features need to be changed, and what product feature areas can be deprioritized from all immediate future releases.

The way you assign this monetary value to each feature is by calculating how much time and team effort they will take to build. Within this prioritization framework, the first feature would be the one your team focuses on first.

Choose a list of features, ideas, or updates and assign a monetary value to each one. Put together a group of people up to 8 customers or your own internal team. Ask your participants to buy the features they like. Ask the participants to explain why they spent money on the feature they picked. Then, reorganize that list of features in order of how much money your customers were willing to spend on them.

Innovation games suggests that you price some of the features high enough that no one can buy them. A good framework is a way to get everyone on the same page in terms of what the greater goals are for the product.

Prioritization methods are an exercise in assessing the many possible decisions that can be made around any given feature or idea. Having a standardized prioritization process is only one piece of the strategic puzzle. There are many moving pieces involved in making sure your strategy is driven by solving the most impactful customer problems—as well communicating that strategy across the entire organization. RICE Known as Intercom's internal scoring system for prioritizing ideas, RICE allows product teams to work on the initiatives that are most likely to impact any given goal.

SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and—as seen in the parameter for the Reach score—time-based.

It lessens the influence that inherent biases have on prioritization. By adding a confidence dimension in the calculations, prioritization moves away from attempting to predict success to measuring the level of assertion each team member has for the features. RICE prioritization is simply an exercise in quantifying features in a way that takes into account the level of confidence teams have on their estimations.

Effort This simple approach to prioritization involves taking your list of features and initiatives and quantifying them using value and effort scores. Pros of using value vs. For some organizations, effort could just mean development effort, in others it could be the implementation cost. A flexible prioritization framework can be used by any type of company, industry or type of product.

By encouraging teams to quantify and numerically score features, product teams can agree on which initiatives have more weight than others. It leaves vague guesswork and assumptions out of the prioritization discussions. In companies where resources are extremely limited, something as simple as a value vs. All it requires is an agreed-upon numerical value that gets added into one overall total number.

Cons of using using value vs. This leaves a lot of room for cognitive bias at the hands of the people doing the estimating. The final score for each feature might be too inflated, or not accurate enough. It can be hard to use with large teams with multiple product lines, components, and product teams that oversee each of those.

Kano Model The Kano model plots two sets of parameters along a horizontal and a vertical axis. Performance features: The more you invest in these, the higher the level of customer satisfaction will be. Every strategic leader should use a prioritization matrix to evaluate the best use of the scarce resources of their organization. On a prioritization matrix, the vertical axis typically represents the benefit or value of a project or initiative, which can encompass the market potential of new products, cost savings of systems, sales lifts of different marketing initiatives, etc.

The horizontal axis typically represents the cost or effort to make the project or an initiative a reality. In decision making , it is useful to compare the relative benefits and costs of different potential initiatives. While a cost-benefit analysis can be done, putting a set of options on a prioritization matrix allows a group of people to quickly debate the relative positioning of the benefits and costs of different options. In my experience, utilizing a prioritization matrices makes it quicker and easier to align people.

You can determine absolute or relative values. Absolute values can come from a cost-benefit analysis, reports, experiments, estimation, etc. Relative values should be assigned utilizing brainstorming , debate, or the Delphi method.

The effort axis can represent cost, capital, ease of implementation, people, timing or other effort levers. Once again, you can assign levels of effort on an absolute or relative basis. If you have actual data and analysis, then use the data to plot the options.