Prioritization is the symptom, not the illness

Why prioritization always seems to be an issue... and what to do about it.

Have you noticed any patterns in the times where you agonize over making a decision? To make that big bet, invest in that relationship, or go in a different direction?

If you're anything like me, these situations are where you are most at risk of spinning out and burning a lot of time and energy.

For me, they have two things in common: (1) there is no right answer, and (2) I'm not clear about what really matters.

Whether you're a VP or an APM, prioritization is an ongoing pain for everyone in product. And oh, do we love our prioritization frameworks: (R)ICE, MoSCoW, Kano, cost of delay, importance vs satisfaction...the list goes on.

We reach for these frameworks like a binkie, because they help us get unstuck when we don't know what to do. They do have their place. But from a leadership perspective, they're a red herring.

Prioritization is the symptom, not the illness.

The illness is our lack of focus.

Our PMs are drowning in feature requests and fighting a war of attrition. As leaders, we've spread our resources too thin and are trying to make the org do too much. This is because we haven't done the work to focus on what is truly important. Focus means cutting priorities, not ranking them.

This is a failure of leadership. Specifically, it is the predictable result of leadership abdicating the work of strategy.

Time for a gut check: as product leaders, have we truly done the work to create and operationalize a strategy that is clear, coherent, and compelling?

If not, then it's not fair for us to complain about other departments providing lots of inbound feature requests that "aren't strategically aligned." Of course the inbound ideas aren't strategically aligned — they don't know the product strategy! If there even is one.

So, what's a product leader to do?

First: keep your prioritization framework. RICE—or any reasonable method—is fine, if used consistently. (Only applying it once, by scoring ideas and then just building whatever is on top, is a different failure mode. But I digress.)

Second: start actually developing a strategy. The bare minimum I suggest you do is to take a few hours and write down what your team(s) are already doing, why, and what the expected outcome is. One page of prose, max. Then, talk about it with your team members and cross-functional colleagues to get some basic alignment on it. This is a far cry from doing an actual product strategy, but it will help.

Third: try to focus (cut) more and prioritize (rank) less.

This nudge was first published on Mind the Product.