Essential product skills: 100-point voting

What you should take away: 100-point voting is a quick way to identify the most important problems to tackle for your product, and build a lot of trust along the way.?

Okay, technically this isn’t a skill - it’s a framework. But it’s such a powerful one that I felt the need to share it - I’ve used it at every company I’ve worked at so far.

I was first introduced to this tool when I was a junior PM at Yelp, having just joined a new team. The team already had several engineers working on the problem space, and the question we had to tackle was: what are we doing next? We had a good number of good options, and we had to quickly decide what we should focus on for the coming quarter. I had little knowledge or experience, so how could I possibly decide?

The exact same situation happened when I joined Apheris, and again when I joined Blinkist, and again when I moved into the Head of Product role at Go1, dealing with three new product areas.?

The core problem: how do you quickly decide what to focus on vs what to deprioritise, when you have limited knowledge and experience, and those around you have a lot more of it? How can you reach a great decision together? Let’s dive in!

100-point voting

The framework

Imagine you shared a list of potential problems you could try to solve with your team and key stakeholders, and asked them which ones to tackle. Most likely you would get the answer “They’re all important”. Not very helpful.

You want to force them to make hard prioritisation choices. You only have limited time and bandwidth to tackle problems, so they need to think in the same way: limited resources. Those resources are the 100 points. With each stakeholder you share a list of the problems you could tackle (I would recommend limiting it to 10 options), with a prompt like this:

Hey! I’m working on the plans for product X, and I would love your help figuring out which problems are most important to tackle first to drive the most impact. You can find a list of options in the linked document. Please distribute 100 points across those options - you can score them in any way you want, you could even put all points on a single item. Please do so by {deadline} so we can move fast. Please let me know if you have any questions!

Share this prompt together with a link to where you want them to add the votes. There’s two ways you can do this.

The first option is doing it in a live meeting. For this I like to prepare a spreadsheet listing the options, and having a column for each person to vote. Working within the same spreadsheets gives a sense of unity. Before the voting you go through the options to clarify what they mean, then everyone takes 5-10 minutes to vote. By making the text of each voting number white, you make sure people can’t see the other votes and won’t be biased by the others. Immediately after voting you will have the totals per idea, and can discuss the top ones further.?

But what if your stakeholders are distributed across many time zones? Then the async method is better, using a separate document (or Google form) for each voter containing: the options, a comprehensive description of what each option means, and a column for adding the votes. After everyone has voted, you can then manually aggregate the votes for each option to determine the top ones, and follow up asynchronously with the next steps (see later).

You can find a template for both options here: spreadsheet, document.?

Who to ask

Now the tricky question: who do you ask to add their 100-point voting?

The risk is that if you ask too few people, you might miss an important perspective, and key stakeholders will feel left out. But if you ask too many people, especially from the same department, you may bias your results, and it will be harder to discuss the results afterwards.

Therefore, I would aim for around five to ten people, definitely including:

• Yourself
• The engineering manager or tech lead of the team
• The designer and/or UX researcher of the team
• PMs who have worked in this space in the past, or your manager
• Several key stakeholders from other parts of the business - sales, go-to-market, operations

If you do end up asking a lot of people from one side of the business, you could consider downweighting the votes so that it’s more even, or splitting the totals by department to see if there’s any specific issues that are top-of-mind for different departments. But it’s easier to avoid this altogether by carefully choosing who you ask.?

The follow-up

Alright, you’ve set up the voting, reached out to the right stakeholders, and they’ve all added the votes. What’s next?

First, aggregate the votes and rank the items from most votes to least. Now look at the top ideas. In my experience, there are almost always 2-3 clear winners that have vastly more votes than the rest. These are your top candidates.?

Now comes the discussion part. Do you, your team, and your key stakeholders agree that these are in fact the most important ideas? If you said “we will do nothing except these 2-3 items in the next 3-6 months”, how would they feel? If you did the voting in a live meeting, you can have this discussion immediately, and then follow up with the decisions via a Slack message or document.

But if you did it async, I think it’s best to share the results of the voting via a document, giving the people that voted the option to add comments. The document can be quite simple: why did you do the voting, what came out of it, what’s next (i.e. focus on those top 2-3 ideas), and the full voting results (allowing the others to add comments to discuss).

I would also strongly recommend following up with 1:1 meetings with each person that voted to discuss live. This exercise is as much about prioritisation as it is about building trust and making everyone feel included and heard.?

Why it works

It seems like an overly simplistic framework to make prioritisation decisions, but it’s surprisingly effective and efficient. Here’s why.

• Oftentimes people in your company already have a good grasp for what the problems are (more true for scale-ups and enterprises than start-ups) - there’s just so many of them, so people get stuck in decision paralysis. This framework quickly unblocks that.
• There’s almost always 2-3 clear winners, leading to a clear decision. For the rest, it creates an ordering of potential initiatives and priorities to revisit later.
• Usually everyone agrees that those are the right focus areas, leading to high buy-in and trust - or if they don’t, they at least feel heard about their ideas and concerns, and are willing to commit to what came on top.
• Although it doesn’t explicitly incorporate effort, impact, and feasibility, people will typically implicitly incorporate this into their vote counts?

When it doesn’t work

When does this framework not work well? Here’s when I believe it not to be the right choice.

• You and your team don’t have a clear sense of what the most important problems are to solve. There are problems you haven’t unearthed yet (e.g. products without product-market fit).
• Your options are solutions, not problems. This could be fine if you have strong conviction that those solutions are the right ones for the underlying problems, but it’s better to stay closer to problems to avoid limiting yourself to a specific solution that may end up not working.?
• There are too many things to vote on - the more you have, the more you risk people missing the important one, or misunderstanding what each item means. The absolute maximum I’ve seen work is 20, but around 10 is better.
• You asked too many people from one side of the business, leading to too much weight for their problems, and too little for the rest.
• You got a lot of items with many votes (e.g. 5+), decided to tackle them all, leading to a lack of punch and delivery. Focus on 1-2 at a time and make sure you deliver quick wins.?

Coda

The 100-point voting framework is a really efficient and effective way to quickly identify, together with your stakeholders, which problems are the most important to tackle first. It’s particularly powerful when you are new to a business or product, and those around you have a lot of first-hand experience and knowledge of the biggest pain points that need to be solved - such as the first few months in a new role. It’s a great way to ramp up quickly and get a good intuition from those around you.?

You can put something together in a few hours and reach a decent now-next-later roadmap for your team. It’s not going to be perfect - there will be problems you identify later, or new information you gather that make you question the priorities.?

And that’s okay! The goal of a roadmap is not to have a set-in-stone plan, but rather to have strong focus areas to start with and deliver on. Once you move on to the next problems that scored high, you can reassess the priorities, and communicate any changes to your stakeholders.?

Give it a try in your next role, and let me know how it goes!