Product Management 3: A Prioritisation Framework
Joanna Hoffman: I'm begging you to manage expectations.
Steve Jobs: Have I ever let you down?
Joanna Hoffman: Every single goddamn time.
Steve Jobs: Then I'm due.
From the movie Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs is often considered to be one of the best Product Managers of our times. But then again, he was also widely controversial - there were many within his team he did not get along with and he had several issues on his way to launching great products.
Truth be told, a PM’s job can be rewarding yet ambiguous - you’re the “CEO of the product” you’re told, but you don’t really have the final word. You’re supposed to lead all the stakeholders, but everyone from the engineering team to the customer seems to blame you for the backlogs/ crashes. In all this madness, setting the right expectations and managing tasks in a logical fashion becomes crucial. Especially so that you can explain your decision, both to the team building the product as well as the executives/clients you’re answerable to.
This is where a good prioritisation framework comes in. It removes the ambiguity involved in decision making and sets the correct expectations, especially when backlogs are concerned. By using a formula, Product Managers can arrive at a score to prioritise ideas/ features/ tasks and rank them in an order that can be explained to the entire team and adhered to during a product roadmap.
To discuss the product prioritisation framework, we’re joined by Akhil Jayaprakash, who is a Senior Product Manager at Amazon’s Lab 126. He shares with us the framework he and his team use to prioritise requirements. More below.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t heard the second episode as part of the product management series, on app development and growth hacking for the Indian market with Deepak Abbot, check out the podcast here. In the episode Deepak shares some awesome insights such as:
The characteristics and size of the Indian app market and the peak season for app launches in India
Reasons for so many app uninstalls in the Indian market and ways to build a successful beta + launch strategy
Metrics to measure, tools to use and case study of Google Pay’s referral program
Paying subscribers of the newsletter can also access the video presentation by Deepak at this link. It includes a detailed discussion on app life cycle, the various funnels through which a user passes through during the journey, benchmark industry statistics and much much more! It is an absolute masterclass!
Ravish: Traditionally there are some common prioritisation frameworks like MoSCoW, KANO and RICE that are theoretically fine, but there are some limitations. What is the framework that you use?
Akhil: I use a a modified version of the RICE prioritization model to calculate a cumulative score, using which a rank can be assigned to the product requirement. Credits for this framework goes to Cliff Crocker and Lauren Nagel. They helped bring this structure into our product management process at Akamai. The table below explains the scoring framework.
The columns in orange are assigned a value between 0-5 by the PM. Those in green, namely Tech Debt and Product Line Priority, are assigned by the engineering team and the executives. Each of the score is multiplied by their respective weight to derive the final cumulative score.
Tech debt is the lever you offer engineering when they talk about investing some of their engineering capacity in improving operational excellence. The Product Line Priority is the lever you offer your executives when they try to bubble up a request within your backlog. The idea of these levers is to provide accountability and clarity into where the request came from.
For example: Problem 2 / Feature 2 is a feature request that clearly has low customer value but it’s an engineering driven request that will help the business scale and reduce our opex cost. It clearly has a higher score compared to problem 3 / feature 3.
Here is the formula for calculating product priority score, you may change the columns based on what’s relevant for the product you are working on.
A ranked list of feature requests based on the product priority score is how a product manager’s backlog should look like. However, when it comes to execution, you also need to take into account the amount of effort that would be required. An engineering backlog score can be calculated by dividing the product priority score by the effort. You can tweak the effort estimates based on how your team operates.
Having a list of ranked features based on engineering backlog score highlights if there is a decrease in execution velocity and help you ask for more resources. The true benefit of this framework is when you have the ability to combine multiple product manager backlogs into a single one based on the score, each product manager has the ability to anchor on a particular benefit and then increase or decrease their score as needed. This is especially helpful in large companies where PMs often share a common pool of engineering resources.
In summary, having a prioritization framework helps bring a team together and have a very rational backlog grooming session. However, this is not a silver bullet- you could fine tune the weights and the columns based on what’s relevant for your team.
If you liked reading about the framework, check out a new newsletter Akhil is launching called Product Chronicles at https://productchronicles.substack.com and follow him on Twitter at @akhiljp_dev.
Thanks,
Ravish