Leading product executives know that building great products is both an art and a science. Even if they don't directly participate in the product development process, most product executives are well acquainted with the challenges of managing a portfolio of products. While creativity and outside-the-box thinking are encouraged, prioritization frameworks are also necessary for consistency and alignment.
The science portion of product portfolio management is the framework and methodologies that guide the regular tasks, keeping everyone on track and in line with the company goals. The artistic side of product development is when creativity flourishes, new ideas are generated, and opinions compete to determine the next best priority.
It All Starts with Clarity
Clarity is the key to putting the pieces of the product development puzzle together. As product executives, when you clearly communicate your company goals and long-term visions to your product managers, they can create product strategies that help move the needle forward. From there, your product teams will also have a better understanding of what features to prioritize. Every decision they make can align with the bigger picture.
However, before anything can be prioritized, your product teams need clarity on each idea's potential. The prioritization process relies on evaluating the next best step from a business perspective and in terms of value for the customer. For example, will feature A be easy to implement, generate more value for the product, and make the customer happy? If not, is there another feature that will?
These decisions should never be based on someone's opinion or gut feeling. Product teams need to have a systematic approach to determine the potential of each idea. There needs to be criteria, a cross-collaborative discussion, and a strategy in place. The criteria and strategy part can be done by using a feature scoring method that aligns with your company's values and production methodology.
The Art of Prioritization & Product Scoring
The rapid rate of innovation, consumer demand, and market opportunities demand agility. The days of sticking to a rigid plan from start to finish are over. When your company uses Agile or a hybrid combination, it’s imperative that your product management teams have the flexibility to pursue multiple ideas, continuously assess and validate the best ones, and change the product definition when the data determines it is needed.
How can your executive team support your company's product development efforts? You can start by understanding their challenges and empowering your product managers to make informed decisions. One of the tenets of using SAFe Agile practices to develop successful products is using the recommended Weighted-Shortest Job First (WSJF) formula to rank product ideas by assigning a score to each one.
What Is the Weighted Shortest Job First Formula?
The WSJF formula (cost of delay/job duration) helps product development teams assign values to the potential features and capabilities of each product or component. The score then lets the product manager know roughly which ideas have a higher value. While not all high scores are automatically prioritized first, the scoring system is valuable.
Calculating the WSJF score involves determining the cost of delay. This value is the total of the User-Business Value, Time to Criticality, and Risk Reduction. Product managers must work closely with other product stakeholders to determine the values of each proposed idea. The resulting figures will determine the score of the idea once fed into the formula.
The scoring process can take a significant amount of time in a product manager’s schedule, but when they have the right tools to oversee their products, manage their backlogs, and score and prioritize digitally, everything gets easier.
How Should The WSJF Formula Be Used?
Scoring product ideas and feature suggestions may be challenging. Still, it is highly useful in filtering good ideas from great ones. Sometimes, discussion and strategy can override the scoring. There may be cases where a high-scoring feature requires another feature with a lower score to be developed first—also called the "enabler."
For example, a facial recognition login feature for a mobile device cannot be implemented until a high-quality camera is developed and added to the product. A high-tech login feature cannot function without a quality camera lens, even though the camera itself may be a lower priority for the customer. In this case, creating the camera not only makes the login feature possible but also facilitates the development of other, higher-value features across the portfolio of products.
Help Your Teams Back Up Their Decisions with Data
Your product management teams make the best product portfolio decisions when they have reliable data to back them up. Whether they’re using the WSJF formula, Kano model, MoSCoW method, or other scoring system, they need a tool that keeps their work centralized, transparent, and efficient.
Here at Gocious, we’ve launched a new feature in our robust product roadmap management software that allows your teams to track, score, and prioritize ideas all in one, easy-to-read dashboard. Each team, each product, and each component can use separate dashboards along with their preferred scoring formula. This gives product teams autonomy to find the best solutions while staying aligned with business strategies.
Questions to Ask About the Priority List
At the end of the day, whatever plans your product managers outline for your new and existing products, they'll need to justify and back up their rationale to you and your fellow executives. You may have questions about their priority list; for example, was there consensus amongst stakeholders on the feature scores? Did all the top priorities have high scores, and if not, why?
If you've ever sat through a lengthy product presentation where your product managers fumbled for details, it doesn't mean your team didn't do their jobs well. In many cases, poor presentations are the result of inadequate and outdated tools.
Imagine your product leaders presenting clear, fact-based product plans to you in a visually pleasing dashboard. They can easily answer your questions on why an idea is given higher priority over others while displaying relevant data, such as the return on investment, job size, and customer feedback. No more complicated graphs or black-and-white reports to sift through—Everything happens on-screen in real-time. Gocious PRM software does all this for your product teams and more.
Help Your Product Teams Prioritize More Effectively
Are you ready to support your product management teams and help them prioritize ideas more effectively and manage their product portfolios efficiently? Schedule a free demo of Gocious product roadmap management software to see how our innovative tools can ease the workload on your product managers.
