We cannot make a good execution plan without prioritizing between requirements. Typically, a product team needs to deliver dozens if not hundreds of outcomes to the customers, and since we do not have infinite people and resources, we cannot deliver all of them at once. We have to sequence our work.
There are a lot of prioritization frameworks — Kano, MoSCoW, Opportunity Scoring, Cost of Delay, RICE, etc. People tend to over-engineer these. The problem is the more elaborate the model, the less likely it is to be used consistently. So keep your model simple but consistent.
Cost of Delay is one of the simplest models for prioritization. It boils down to this money now is better than money later. We could release a big, elaborate feature in 10 months and start making $100K per month or we could release a smaller feature in one month and start making $5K per month. In this case, it is much better to deliver the smaller feature first, start banking that money, and then work on the bigger feature.
The easiest way to calculate the cost of delay is to take the value we are estimating to get from a feature and divide it by the effort we are estimating to spend on building the feature. This gives us a ratio of value per effort. Or bang for the buck. The higher the bang for the buck, the higher the priority should be. In theory, this sounds great. But there is a problem -
Human beings suck at estimating the absolute sizes of things, but we are great at estimating relative sizes. It’s not our fault. We evolved this way.
I will prove it to you: Can you tell me the area of the room you are sitting in exact sq. meters? Probably not. But can you tell me if your room is 1/2 the area of your house? 1/3rd? 1/5th? I bet your guess is much closer to the reality in the second case.
The same goes for the feature effort and value estimates that we need to do for our prioritization. Since we are only estimating the size of efforts and value, it is very hard to come up with absolute values without spending a LOT of time in wasteful upfront design and analysis. It is much better to do relative estimates — pick a feature that everyone understands quite well, and come to an agreement on its value and effort estimates as a group. Then pick the next feature and compare the value and effort estimates of that feature to your reference feature. Is it 1/2? 1/5? x2? x10? This will guarantee to improve your estimations and speed up the process of estimation itself. Win-win!
In our Prioritization Matrix, you can do exactly this.
You can visually place your features in a 2-dimensional graph to quickly estimate the relative value of and relative efforts required for each requirement compared to your reference requirement.
But that is not all.
We take it one step further: we know from experience that feature that delivers large value for low effort are the low-hanging fruits. They should be picked asap. On the other hand, features that deliver large value but take a lot of effort should be planned properly and perhaps split into smaller features that can be delivered faster. Features that take a lot of effort and deliver little value should probably be avoided, and features that take little effort to deliver little value should be done whenever you have time to fill.
On Prodeasy’s prioritization canvas, this is exactly what you can do. We have divided the canvas into four quadrants and you can visually see your low-hanging fruits and your time sinks and decide on what to do with them.
But that is not all.
We made it even better. You see, the words “Large”, “Small”, “Little”, and “High” is all relative to the context. One team’s large effort might be another team’s little effort. So when it comes to prioritization quadrants one size does not fit all.
That’s why we have made these quadrants customizable. You can decide your thresholds for “High” and “Low” effort and values by moving the cut lines on the prioritization graph. Now, not only you can quickly estimate your features, but you can be sure that those estimates are fairly correct and they fit your context.
So to recap, with Prodeasy’s prioritization matrix you can
Happy planning!
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