Prioritization: The Great Juggling Act

Prioritization can be simultaneously the most critical and difficult activity to get right in a successful digital initiative. During upfront Discovery, you’re often thinking about pie-in-the-sky, big-picture, what-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up ideas without the realities of budgets and deadlines. Deciding where to start or go next is challenging, especially when you add stakeholders with different POVs into the mix.

Below are some tactics you can employ to ensure you are making strategic, results-focused prioritization decisions.

Set Your Guideposts

Clearly define your key business goal(s).

You will likely have a hefty list of business goals, OKRs, KPIs, etc. associated with your project. Whittle this down to, ideally, one (no more than three) key goal(s) to use as your first guidepost for prioritization. When faced with a decision, asking “how does this requirement impact X goal?” can quickly clarify tradeoffs.

Determine which constraint of the iron triangle is fixed.

Scope, cost and schedule are all important and intricately connected to each other. It’s helpful to decide upfront which constraint is most important and use this as the second guidepost. Is there a deadline that cannot be missed due to external factors? Then, schedule is your fixed constraint and scope and/or cost will need to be variable.

Don’t forget to socialize your key business goals and constraints to all project stakeholders and team members so that day-to-day micro-decisions can be made with these in mind as well.

Avoid Bloat for Your “Must-Have” Requirements

Save your “must-have” or high priority designation for requirements that truly fit the bill. These should be the functional or nonfunctional requirements essential for the feature to be usable. Things like nifty animations or quality-of-life automations may be highly desirable, but, when push comes to shove, would you block the release for those? Or could you shorten your path to ROI generation by making them a lower priority? It’s likely that some lower priority items will make it into your release in addition to “must-haves”, but you risk wasting upfront resources on less critical items when you overload the top priority designation.

Learn and Iterate (Don’t Just Say You Will)

“We’ll get to that in the next release” quickly becomes a fallacy at organizations that are constantly moving on to the next shiny feature without reserving bandwidth to use data to refine existing features and shape their roadmap. In turn, this creates a culture of “everything is a must-have” because stakeholders don’t trust that their requirements will be considered for a future release, since there is no standard for iteration. Starting your project with a solid measurement strategy and following through on analyzing it is crucial for prioritization down the road.

It’s natural to want everything at once, but by using these strategies you can ensure early releases deliver the value that allows you to continue making investments to get where you ultimately want to be.