Tackling Prioritization Challenges in Product Management
Reding time 5 min
TL;DR
Prioritization can be challenging if it does not align with the company's strategy.
The process of prioritization starts with the product strategy.
As a PM, having a clear product strategy helps you justify your prioritization decisions.
Spending more time on the strategy horizon and less on the operation horizon can help you prioritize effectively.
Why is it difficult to prioritize?
In the Product Management community, prioritization is a common topic for discussion and it's widely recognized as a crucial aspect of the PM job. However, when deciding how to prioritize initiatives, there's often confusion around the criterias used to make the decision.
Typically, Product managers build the prioritization based on the value of an initiative, but what exactly does value mean? There are numerous values to take into consideration, such as customer satisfaction, cost, technology, time, conversion, and business value. These values are not directly comparable, making it difficult for stakeholders to understand, and Product managers to prioritize consistently.
“Strategies help you to prioritize,”
My experience is that stakeholders tend to work around this prioritization by elevating the initiatives or projects to the company's leadership team to get them prioritized, overruling the prioritization. Stakeholders are doing this based on the assumption that the company's leadership team has a better understanding of the company's priorities and what is important for the business.
So, what's the problem?
The overall problem is that we Product managers often try to prioritize based on inputs from customer value and stakeholders, in your roadmap. Often the strongest stakeholders push what they want. The reason for this is probably due to a lack of clear strategy or a lack of awareness of the strategy among those who work closely with the Product manager.
What is a strategy?
Simply put, it's “how” we achieve the product vision and the company's vision. What do we need to do, to reach the product vision? There are many actions about what we need to do and what we shouldn't do. To build the strategy you need to make a lot of choices about what it should be and not, and these choices are important for your strategy, in other words, you are prioritizing.
To make the strategy clear and helpful, I think the use of Principles is a good way to clarify the product strategy even more. If you missing a strategy then you can jump to the end of this article to get some tools on how to create on.
Principles
Principles play a role in making the product strategy clearer. They act as beacons, guiding us in aligning our strategy. While it might seem abstract, applying principles helps in bringing concrete clarity and focus to our strategy. A good way to write them is using an even/over, statement, see examples below.
Mobile devices even over Desktop
Buy products on the market even over build it on our own.
An experiment could be, If you already have a strategy but don’t feel it delivers the value you expected, try to make it clearer with principles.
So how is this all connected to prioritization?
As you may have understood, strategies help you to prioritize, but on a higher level than just doing the prioritization in your roadmap. When you articulate various actions and choices in your strategy, you have already started the prioritization process on a higher level. Since the strategy is aligned with the company's vision, you will have an easier time prioritizing your day-to-day job.
Pitfalls
I have noticed that in some assignments, people tend to focus more on working on activities and solutions (output) rather than the value they want to achieve, which is the outcome. This means that they create projects or initiatives without clear goals, simply because they feel that they should have them. This approach does not help with prioritization, as it only clarifies which projects are important without explaining why they are important. This makes it difficult to prioritize effectively.
However, if we tie our initiatives to the outcome we want to achieve, we can prioritize different opportunities based on the choices we have made in our strategy and principles.
Summary
Prioritization can be a challenging task, especially if it does not align with the company's strategy. The reason is that the process of prioritization starts with the strategy, where choices are made about the value the product should create. As a PM, if the strategy is clear at the product level, you won't get caught up in prioritization discussions based on ideas and features. Instead, you can always refer back to the strategy to justify your prioritization decisions.
To reach this, it’s important that you as a PM spend most of your time on the strategy horizon and less on the operation horizon.
Support with Strategy work
Here is a place where you can find some really good tools that you can use in your work with strategy.
https://www.product-frameworks.com/
An article I wrote about how to get stakeholders aligned and a part of your strategy.
https://www.seventyoneconsulting.se/artiklar/get-common-understanding-with-metaphors
An article my dear colleague wrote on two different tools you can use working strategy.
https://www.seventyoneconsulting.se/artiklar/mapping-strategy-with-wardley-maps-and-s-curves
