What are the best tools to prioritize your product engineering backlog?

1 The value of prioritization

Prioritizing your product engineering backlog is a strategic process that requires clarity, collaboration, and communication. It enables you to focus on the most valuable and feasible outcomes for your product and users, while avoiding wasting time and resources on low-impact or high-risk tasks. Additionally, it allows you to manage expectations and dependencies across stakeholders and teams, as well as adapt to changing requirements and feedback. Lastly, it gives you the ability to measure and evaluate your progress and impact.

2 The criteria for prioritization

Prior to utilizing any tool to prioritize your product engineering backlog, you must define the criteria that will guide your decisions. These criteria will depend on your product vision, strategy, and objectives, but some common ones are value, effort, risk, and dependencies. Value measures how much the task contributes to the product's value proposition, user satisfaction, and business outcomes. Effort considers how much time, effort, and resources the task requires from the product engineering team and other collaborators. Risk takes into account how uncertain or complex the task is and what potential pitfalls or drawbacks could arise from doing or not doing it. Lastly, dependencies illustrate how the task relates to other tasks in your backlog and what prerequisites or consequences there are for doing or not doing it.

3 The tools for prioritization

There are many tools and frameworks that can help you prioritize your product engineering backlog, but they all have their pros and cons. MoSCoW stands for Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won't have, and helps classify tasks by necessity and desirability. It's simple to use but can be subjective and vague. RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort, scoring tasks by potential reach, impact, confidence level, and effort. This is quantitative and objective but time-consuming and complex. ICE stands for Impact, Confidence, and Ease; similar to RICE but simplifying the effort factor into ease. Lastly, WSJF stands for Weighted Shortest Job First; this ranks tasks by cost of delay divided by duration based on the principle of maximizing value delivered per unit of time. However, it can be difficult to estimate the cost of delay and duration of each task.

4 The best practices for prioritization

No matter which tool you choose to prioritize your product engineering backlog, you should follow some best practices to ensure that your prioritization process is effective and efficient. This includes involving stakeholders and team members in the process, seeking their input and feedback. Additionally, you should review and update your criteria and scores regularly, as well as communicate your decisions and rationale clearly. Furthermore, it's important to be flexible and responsive to changing needs and opportunities, re-prioritizing your backlog accordingly. Finally, track and measure the results of your prioritized tasks to learn from them.

5 The benefits of prioritization

Prioritizing your product engineering backlog is an ongoing practice that can help you deliver better products faster and more efficiently. You can align your product engineering work with your product vision, strategy, and objectives by using the right tools and following the best practices. Furthermore, this practice can optimize your resources and capacity, as well as enhance quality and performance. Additionally, it can increase satisfaction and motivation, while creating more value and impact for your product and users.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?