Product Roadmaps Relaunched

Chapter 7. Prioritizing–with Science!

What you’ll learn in this chapter

Why prioritization is crucial

Bad (but common) ways to prioritize

Five prioritization frameworks

Limitations of using a scoring approach to product decisions

Wouldn’t it be great if no one could argue with your decisions?

In this chapter, we will detail five prioritization frameworks you can use and why you might choose each.

Leveraging an objective and collaborative prioritization method will help stakeholders focus on what’s important and come to alignment. It will help you get the buy-in you need to put together a product roadmap that inspires. If it were any more scientific, you’d need a lab coat.

Brenda rushed over from her desk in the sales pit. She was clearly excited. She’d uncovered an opportunity to partner with a local firm that would distribute the company’s free demo to a few thousand of their customers, and she was convinced it would be an easy way to generate a lot of new business quickly. Printing demo discs was cheap, so she just wanted my OK to get some cobranded materials made to package them with, and maybe we could do a seminar together and dedicate some telesales resources to following up on the leads. It was nearly free marketing, right?

I said no. I also helped Brenda understand why this didn’t fit with our strategy, and where she could more profitably focus her sales efforts. The company had been using a free demo disc for a couple of years to bring in small business customers. We’d run the numbers ...