The document discusses 20 techniques for product prioritization, emphasizing the importance of aligning features with customer needs and organizational capabilities. It explores various qualitative and quantitative methods to prioritize work, such as the Kano model, opportunity scoring, and financial analysis, each with specific use cases and challenges. Key takeaways highlight the importance of external validation, thematic grouping, and understanding the customer journey in the prioritization process.

1. 20 Product Prioritization
techniques

2. What can be prioritized?
• Outcomes
• Problems
• Themes
• Features
• Risk
Can’t prioritize an idea you didn’t have
Invalidating ideas (removing them) is more useful than prioritizing them.

3. http://foldingburritos.com
Most excellent guide! (45 pages)
You < Team < Stakeholders < Customers

4. Quantitative and External - Kano
Axes:
Satisfaction vs. Completion/Functionality
Insight:
Customer responses are not symmetrical on
a feature. Provides a methodology to figure
out which category a feature falls in.

5. Quantitative and External - Kano

6. Quantitative and External - Kano
Axes:
Satisfaction vs. Completion/Functionality
Insight:
Customer responses are not symmetrical on
a feature. Provides a methodology to figure
out which category a feature falls in.
When to use:
Replicating an older product.
Finding an adjoining market to pivot off.
Delighters important for virality.
Challenges:
iPhone 1 – No copy/paste. No App store

7. Quant & Ext. – Quality Function Deployment
Axes: Prioritized Need to Spec, Needs to
Organization.
Insight: Customer needs to technical
specifications clearly expressed.
Other stakeholders accounted for
Can be expressed on a single page
When to use:
Mapping customer needs onto the
organization.
Hardware products, Engineering based
teams, Marketing and Sales alignment
Challenges:
Office supplies run out of graph paper

8. Quant & Ext. – Opportunity scoring
Outcome Driven Innovation

9. Quant & Ext – Opportunity scoring
Axes: Satisfaction vs. Importance
Similar to Kano(S,I) and QFD (I)
Insight:
Overserved is commoditized. Reduce cost
Underserved is innovation
When to use:
Legacy product strategy
Looking for growth
Looking for feature reduction
Easily done as surveys
Challenges:
Establishing the right level of question.
Creating a job map.

10. Quant & Ext(?). – Buy a feature
Axes: Features cost and Stakeholders
Insight:
Have a discussion in context with other
features and stakeholders.
Feature cost matters.
When to use:
Can be done remotely with chat.
Non-tech folks begin to question the cost of
‘simple’ features if used in conjunction with
planning poker.
Can replace shuttle diplomacy.
Challenges:
Getting everyone together.
Common understanding of the
feature/outcome.

11. Qualitative & External.

12. Qualitative & Ext. – Story Mapping
Axes: User Task vs. Feature
completeness (Connect 4)
Insight:
The customer journey needs to be
considered instead of features in
isolation.
When to use:
In combination with UX and
ethnographic techniques.
Gaps in current products
Product phasing, Lean, MVP.
Challenges:
Figuring out the user tasks.
Note:
Contrast with Kano, theme
prioritization
Jeff Patton

13. Qualitative & Ext. - MoSCoW
• Must Have
• Should Have
• Could Have
• Won’t Have

14. Qualitative & Ext. - MoSCoW
• Must Have
• Should Have
• Could Have
• Won’t Have

15. Qualitative & Ext. – Prune the Product tree
Axes: Time and categories/themes
Insight:
Visualizing growth in a tree is easier than visualizing
features on a timeline
When to use:
Discuss priorities without hard numbers or
deadlines.
Identify areas of low growth. Agree on areas of
growth. What are the branches?
Challenges:
Sticky notes fall.

16. Qualitative & Ext. – Speed Boat
Axes: Satisfaction (?) Annoyance (?)
Insight:
People feel comfortable expressing opinions in a
gamified fashion.
Black hat thinking.
When to use:
Deadlock. Sensitive topics.
Risk prioritization
Replaces: What are the top five improvements
you would like to see.
Challenges: Conflates importance, satisfaction
and annoyance.
Compare with ODI and Kano.

17. Quantitative & Ext. Takeaways
• Overall product shape instead of
individual features
• Strategic direction

18. Qualitative & Internal– Classification ranking

19. Qualitative & Internal – Stacked ranking
Axes: Importance
Insight:
One simple prioritized list is all we can manage.
I’m an expert - just do what I say.
When to use:
Pragmatic.
Large distributed development teams.
Waterfall projects
Schedule is important.
Challenges:
Being right.

20. Qualitative & Internal– KJ Method
• Group voting
• Individual sticky notes
• Group similar items
• Vote for importance.
Axes: Groups vs. Ranking
Insight:
People reach informed group consenus better
and faster when they have access to other
people’s thoughts.
When to use:
Large diverse groups
Time bound
Challenges:
Voting could be subjective if objective is not
clearly defined.
Self-censorship.
Assumed limitations.

21. Qualitative & Internal– Feature Buckets
Metrics
Movers
Customer
Requests
Delight Strategic
Pay the bills Don’t
alienate the
customer or
miss key
insights
Inspire
loyalty and
passion in
users
Experiment
Collect Data
Axes: Four KPIs
Insight:
Balance long term revenue over short term
revenue.
Move multiple KPIs
When to use:
Balanced major monolithic releases.
Evaluate on schedule overruns.
Forces clarity on why the feature was included.
Challenges:
Still need to prioritize within the bucket.
Be clear about why a feature is being done.

22. Qualitative & Internal– Systemico Model
Prioritized goals
Userengagement
Axes: Goals and Engagement
Insight:
Deliver core value quickly
Not just cost and schedule – also engagement
Each level generates validated learning
Value is not holistic and non-linear.
When to use:
Too much focus on what story costs and not on
other dimensions.
Visually show which areas are in focus.
Lean and broad product.
Challenges:
Hard to classify stories into user engagement
level
Compare to:
Story mapping

23. Quant & Int. – Financial Analysis
• New Revenue – New income.
• Incremental Revenue – upgrade or additional services.
• Retained Revenue - income not lost (customer churn is reduced).
• Cost Savings: Any type of operational efficiency gained within
company.
Increase revenue vs. Increase Margin
- Net Present Value (Discount Cash Flow. Compare against opp. cost)
- Internal Rate of Return (Compare against projects)
- Discounted Payback Period (How long till investment is recovered)
Do it.
Challenges: Lots of factors make it hard to track forecast vs. actuals.

24. Quant & Int. – Ian McAllister’s framework
• Director @ AirBnB
• Prioritize themes (KPIs – AAAR,
revenue, visits/user, etc.) first. Then
projects within.
• Sequence and resource your
themes
• Generate ideas. BIGGER ideas.
smaller projects (first 20% delivers
80% impact)
• Estimate impact, Estimate cost
• Prioritize within each theme
Axes: Theme/KPI and Project
Insight:
Resources allocated to themes explicitly
Resolves prioritization conflicts between apples
and oranges (500ms latency, 5K new users)
Forces modelling of impact. Hones product
sense.
When to use:
The KPIs are not clear or prioritized.
Too many disparate competing features and
projects (Portfolio prioritization)
Continuous resource contentions.
Challenges: These are strategy guidelines.

25. Quant & Int. – Impact on business goal
• Acquisition: users come to the site
product;
• Activation: users enjoy 1st visit,
signup;
• Retention: users come back
multiple times;
• Revenue: users’ activity leads to
revenue for the product;
• Referral: users like product enough
to recommend to others.
Axes: KPI and Feature
Insight:
Figure out which KPI to improve. Then validate
the improvement.
When to use:
Lean Startup
Challenges:
Strategy guideline.
Cycle time can be long if traditional large
company.

26. Quant & Int. – Value vs. Cost
Axes: Value and Effort/Cost
Insight:
Effort matters
When to use:
Always (?)
Challenges:
Can end up doing only low value work.
Both Value and Cost can drift.
Determining value (Pair with opportunity scoring)

27. Quant & Int. – Value vs. Risk
Axes: Value and Risk
Insight:
Risk covers the extremes of Cost
When to use:
New ventures, New Technology
Challenges:
Hard to estimate.
Note:
Combine with previous
- Pessimistic value
- Pessimistic effort.

28. Quant & Int. – Scorecard
Axes: Criteria and Feature
Insight:
Features are not one dimensional. They have
cost, benefit, risk, strategic value, portfolio value,
number of customer requests, lost deals, etc.
When to use:
Drive a discussion of what KPIs are important.
Consolidate stakeholders.
Challenges:
The right criterion?
Are weights cooked?
Fragmented products – no shared understanding.
Don’t avoid a product strategy discussion
Don’t avoid the organizational dysfunction
discussion.
http://blog.cauvin.org/2015/08/why-spreadsheets-suck-for-prioritizing.html

29. Quant & Int. – Theme screening/Relative
screening. Axes: Feature and Criteria
Insight:
Assigning a relative number is easier than an
absolute number
When to use:
When it’s easier to compare than quantify
Challenges:
Picking baseline that’s easy to compare against.

30. Takeaways
• External > Internal. (Get out of the building)
• Drive alignment – Identify the KPI/Strategy. Revenue is king.
• Split into themes, buckets if you cannot prioritize across them.
• Think holisitically – the customer journey and overall product shape.
• Align features with organizational capability
• Figure out what prioritization is being discussed (outcomes, problems,
themes, features, risk)
• Customer responses are non symmetrical.
• Find overserved and underserved areas
• Use a relative baseline if absolute rankings are not possible