Four Strategies for Effective Product Prioritization

How to gain buy-in and accelerate bringing exceptional digital products to market

By Greg Calacouris

Prioritization translates strategy into tangible decisions. It’s often seen as a way to merely decide what’s more important, but a prioritization approach integrated from the start to end of the product lifecycle ensures your strategy turns into a product in market. There’s a variety of approaches—from as simple as defining what a product must-have, should-have, could-have, and won’t-have (MoSCoW) to as advanced as a formula with weighted scores. Developing a prioritization approach ensures your team invests their time and energy into what’s truly needed by the business and users.

I’ve worked with major financial service providers, healthcare companies, automobile manufacturers, DTC brands, and utility companies to build prioritization frameworks. These frameworks have brought into focus which ideas to pilot, what research is most important, which features should be developed next, and what strategic bets the organization should take.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• How to pick the right framework
• What it takes to get buy-in for the product priorities you define
• How to use prioritization frameworks as a catalyst for innovation
• When to iterate your prioritization

Tailor your approach

Every team has a unique set of circumstances, from communication styles to data available to make decisions. Understanding what you need to achieve from prioritization will help you pick the right approach. Start by asking the following questions.

1. What does your team need?

A new product team who needs buy-in from senior leaders on initiatives to grow the company has entirely different needs than a mature product team who needs to field requests from stakeholders across their company.

The ultimate goal is to justify “why we’re focusing on this over that”. Knowing what purpose your framework will serve will help keep you focused and make the next two questions easier to answer.

2. What data can we use to prioritize?

Prioritization is commonly boiled down to what is urgent. Understanding why something is urgent may be your first clue for what data you should use to prioritize. At its simplest, prioritization is about understanding effort versus impact. The tricky bit is making sure everyone interprets impact in the same way.

If you have KPIs or opportunity areas that’s a good place to start. If you have data you can use, even better. If you have neither, an easy place to start is ranking impact by low, medium, or high. The exercise of ranking things will begin to tease out what impact means.

Other ways you could rank things:

• The most reach - if growing your user base is essential.
• What provides more data - if better understanding customers means better meeting their needs.
• Largest customer pain points - if improving NPS or reducing friction are critical.

3. Who should be involved?

Having data to prioritize is valuable, but creating alignment is the more important aspect of prioritization. Knowing who is involved informs how to communicate what has been prioritized.

To start, you must get alignment among core members of the product team—which might include product managers, heads of engineering, and design leads—who will be directly affected by the priorities set by the framework. These priorities will shape their work for the coming months and, more broadly, reflect the ethos of what they’re contributing to the world. It is essential for your product team members to understand the reasoning behind the chosen path forward—including why certain issues or recommendations they are passionate about might need to wait. Effective prioritization unites individuals and departments around the bigger picture and the various considerations at play.

Next, who is the audience who sees the output? This might be senior leaders in an executive presentation, or other department heads wanting to understand what’s on the horizon and why. When they’re aligned with the core product team, these stakeholders transform into valuable advocates who can wield their influence to unlock budgets and ensure that you have the green light to move forward.

Frameworks you can leverage

There’s a number of widely-used prioritization frameworks. If you’re able to answer the above questions, you should be in a good spot to pick the right one for you.

I tend to start simple and build in complexity as it’s required. If your approach is too complex from the get go, nobody will use it.

Common prioritization methods include:

Create alignment around your priorities

After you’ve created a framework, the next step is putting it to the test to learn if everyone truly is aligned. It’s the most challenging part of prioritization.

If you find stakeholders are not aligned, don’t panic. But, it merits digging deeper into the reasons why—both explicit and implicit. Prioritization is about getting alignment, as much as it is choosing one thing over another. That means it’s inherently an iterative process. Understanding why people aren’t on the same page is incredibly valuable to get to a shared vision of the future of your product. Some of the biggest risks for misalignment I’ve encountered are: key stakeholders were brought too late into the process, different departments have competing objectives, and even a lack of basic agreement on what “impact” means. This is a sign to step back and revisit your framework.

Prioritization should be an ongoing process, not a one-and-done exercise. As you collect input from stakeholders, or more data becomes available, continue revisiting your prioritization approach. Taking an iterative mindset to prioritization is the most effective way to truly build buy-in with various stakeholders. Over time your process will become more robust and become an increasingly useful tool to discuss and align on how to continue delivering value to customers.

Prioritize long and short-term bets

On one project, working on the digital transformation of a leading utility company, we needed to communicate with senior leaders which initiatives to prioritize for the next three years. Our core client’s team aligned around two dimensions to communicate impact and effort.

An example of a 2x2 prioritization matrix that charts development time vs the frequency of problems:

The 'invest time here' quadrant brought into focus our major initiatives for the next three years. Below, in the 'launch quickly' category, these initiatives would offer high impact with a relatively low-lift investment and could be shipped in a few months. Features that fell into the 'do later' category would be revisited during the next phase of the roadmap.

Innovate through prioritization

A healthcare client wanted to break out of traditional product paradigms and explore how to better deliver on its mission to be a premier player in the health industry and change patients' lives. The goal was to rank ideas that would touch multiple departments, and be able to effectively communicate which ideas had the most promise.

Every idea was rated 1-3 stars on desirability, feasibility, and viability—criteria which resonated with key stakeholders. We needed a much greater level of rigor, because of the amount of people involved, so we created a formula using a range of data inputs.

Examples of a weighted scoring formula and a simple scorecard approach to prioritization:

Bringing it back to product strategy

At its core, delivering on your strategy is about knowing when to move forward at full speed and when to strategically deprioritize products or features that don’t do the job the business or users need them to do.

A prioritization framework can help justify your choices and create stakeholder buy-in to get where you need to go. Regardless of the framework you pick, it’s a tool that shouldn’t be used dogmatically. Effective product strategies leverage frameworks as a starting point to iterate continuously, integrate insights from real-world feedback and data, and achieve optimal product-market fit to deliver outstanding experiences.

About the author

Greg Calacouris is an Associate Director, Strategy at Work & Co. Greg has ten years of experience connecting business opportunities with user needs to deliver impactful digital products for the likes of JP Morgan Chase, Gatorade, Audacy, Mastercard, and Verizon. Past life: Senior Strategist at Possible.