How to Drive Prioritization and Planning by
Microsoft PM
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Salah Ahmed
TONIGHT’S SPEAKERS

Roadmap Prioritization &
Planning
Salah Ahmed

Roadmap prioritization and planning
• The Problem: What to build?
• Gathering requirements
• Defining your goals using OKR methodology
• Advantages of using OKRs
• Prioritizing the features
• Communicating your roadmap

Your customers are screaming at you to build new features.
Your dev team wants to pay off engineering debt.
Your manager has his own agenda.
Your partner teams also have requests.
So what should you build?

Unprioritized list of features
• Talk to customers
• Feedback from official channels
• Social media: Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit
• Talk to sales
• Telemetry
• How’s your usage?
• How’s your quality?
• What are you missing?
• How do you fit into your org’s strategy?
• What are your competitors doing?

“If you don’t know where you are
going, you might not get there.”
Yogi Berra

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
methodology
Objectives should be
• Long term. Shouldn’t change month to month
• Up to 3 objectives for each PM. Up to 5 objectives for a PM team
Key Results should be
• SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely
• 3- 5 Key Results per Objective
• Flexible and updatable
“We will deliver a certain OBJECTIVE as measured by
the following KEY RESULTS: ….”

Advantages of using OKRs
• Requires regular planning
• Commitment from all stakeholders
• Transparency
• Provides focus
• Accountability tracking
• Makes it easier to say no
• Stretch goals boost morale

Sample OKRs
We will increase usage as
measured by the following key
results:
• Increase monthly active
enterprise customers by 3X in
the next 3 months
• Increase monthly active users
by 2X in the next 3 months
• Increasing new app sign-ups
by 2X in the next 3 months
We will decrease customer
dissatisfaction as measured by
the following key results:
• Reduce app crashes by 2X in
the next 3 months
• Reduce support tickets by 3X
in the next 3 months
• Improving availability to 99% in
next 3 months

Create prioritized list of features
• Should help you achieve your Key Results
• List should ideally be stack-ranked
• Accurate list for next 3 months
• Less accurate for next 6 months
• Everything else goes into >6 months bucket

Communicate!
• Communicate your features to your team and partners
• Send regular status updates
• Tweak Key Results if required. Prioritize on an ongoing basis

Recommended reading

Key takeaways
• Define your objectives and key
results (OKRs)
• Prioritize a list of features and plan
your roadmap with your OKRs in
mind
• Communicate the roadmap to
partners and customers
• Close the loop by tracking success

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