We talk with Product Owners and other product leaders all the time about the challenges they face. By far, the number one most cited source of pain is prioritization. Let’s look at why prioritization is so hard and what that can tell us about ways to make it easier…
There’s never enough capacity
We keep waiting for someone to come to us with a question like, “We’ve got all this capacity and we don’t know what to do with it. How do we find something valuable to build?” It just doesn’t happen.
The refrain is always, “We need more resources.”
There’s a simple reason for that. It’s sort of the “physics” of the problem. It takes way less effort to think of something you could build than to actually build the thing. As a result, there will always be more ideas than capacity to implement them.
Thus, you can’t sustainably buy your way out of the prioritization problem. At any practical level of capacity, there will be more ideas than you can implement.
Stakeholders have conflicting goals
Prioritization is often about power more than purpose. Different stakeholders have their own goals and want to use your team’s capacity to make progress on those goals. When those come into conflict, prioritization is more about keeping the right stakeholders happy than about maximizing the business value a team produces.
Predicting the future is hard
Choosing to build feature A before feature B is a bet about the future. It’s a prediction that feature A will produce better outcomes in the future. And that’s often a prediction about things like the future preferences and behaviors of humans—something that’s notoriously hard to predict. People say they want something. They say they’ll do one thing or another. And then, they actually do something different.
Ideas and requests contain a mix of high-value and low-value content
Prioritizing between feature A and feature B is even more difficult because there’s likely part of feature A that’s more valuable than feature B, but also another part of feature A that’s less valuable than some part of feature B. Which is to say, both these features have high-value parts and low-value parts. But we often try to rank them against each other as a whole.
Value is a function of time, not a number
Sometimes, one option is more valuable than another, but that value can’t be experienced yet. For example, it’s May, and you’ve learned about work that needs to be done to comply with a new regulation to avoid large fines starting in January. That work will take a few weeks. From a pure value perspective, that work might be the most important thing your team could do. But if you do that work in May or June, the results will just sit for the rest of the year, providing zero realized value. The right move is actually to prioritize something that’s less valuable in an absolute sense but whose value can be realized sooner.
Cost and value don’t always correlate
Finally, prioritization is hard because some really valuable things aren’t that expensive to do, and some not-so-valuable things are quite expensive. This means we can’t just prioritize based on the value side of things. We have to learn a bit about the cost to evaluate whether the ROI of one option is superior to another. And it often feels like that requires too much detail too early.
How to make it less painful
Given all these challenges, how can you make prioritization less painful?
Better customer understanding. Find the real problem to solve and focus your limited capacity there.
Better data. Since you can’t predict the future accurately, get better at capturing and testing hypotheses so your bets are small and feedback cycles are short.
Better slicing. Since high- and low-value work is often tangled up, get better at slicing off the low-value parts you don’t need to build. This will free up extra capacity for the high-value work. It also often resolves the conflict between stakeholders—the high-value part of both requests might fit.
Better alignment around purpose and vision. Reduce noise from competing priorities by crafting compelling purpose and vision statements and aligning people around them. Then, instead of being asked to build everyone’s favorite, disparate ideas, you’ll have a coherent stream of work.
Better intuition. Prioritization isn’t a spreadsheet problem. You can’t analyze your way out of it. But you can tune your intuition to recognize which bets are worth your team’s limited capacity. You do that by running lots of experiments, getting lots of feedback, and reflecting on what you’re learning.
These are all learnable skills. Join us for our upcoming CSPO workshop or our Advanced CSPO program to level up the skills that’ll make prioritization a competitive advantage rather than a headache.
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