How should you prioritise what gets done first?

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Product, in the right company structure, holds the keys to what gets worked on first, and/or with the most resource … as a priority. When it comes to delivering technology, Product is the voice of the business and is ultimately responsible for collecting all the relevant information ‘from the wider business’ about a feature (or a product) such that they know which is the most important.

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We’ve all worked in organisations where priorities seemingly change every five minutes depending on who shouts loudest or happens to have the most senior voice. You might have heard this referred to as the HiPPO effect = Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. Essentially this gives a disproportionate weighting to the opinion of the HiPPO. The HiPPO may well be right (because their seniority can give them access to better information), but more likely, they’re creating a cognitive bias towards leadership that discourages input from others.

An organisation with too many HiPPOs typically results in product and delivery quality issues because of poor decision making. Ultimately customer satisfaction suffers because it puts customer opinion below that of one individual. Minority rules. Other detrimental effects are roadmaps that become so “right heavy” they slope downwards, features and bodies of work get cancelled or they’re perpetually resigned to the parking lot.

There are many ways to deal with a HiPPO culture… but the best way, is with facts and data. Always. Presenting those facts and snippets of valuable information too late in the planning or even delivery process however, can be as disruptive to as the incorrect prioritisation in the first place, so it’s essential to get stakeholder buy in on how data is used, and how it is used to prioritise work. For this, it’s important to agree on a Business Value formula.

Now I’m no real fan of SAFe having seen it delay delivery as much as does refine it, but the need to identify and measure against business value is one good takeaway from the framework.

BUSINESS VALUE = Key business KPIs

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Defining what business value (BV) is delivered to the business in SAFe is a somewhat ambiguous measurement with a clear scoring of 0 to 10 with 10 being the most value delivered. How one defines what a 10 is needs little explanation as it’s a feature entirely delivered on time, budget and meeting all the pre-defined acceptance criteria (assuming those have been defined). How anything from a 0 to a 9 is defined however, is entirely up to interpretation … hence the ambiguity. There’s still real value in using BV in the first place, if done in a way that’s relevant to your overall business or function goals.

Further up I talked about the disproportionate amount of weighting a HiPPO has when it comes to feature prioritisation. Weighting is a really important part of agreeing how much business value is attributed to a feature, depending on how much that feature contributes to the very business it’s adding value to. Weighting is also different and more effective than planning poker, which whilst it has many stakeholders in the room, is very opinion oriented and less data driven as a methodology.

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As an example. In SAFe business value is supposed to be measured from a combination of anything from brand recognition, to market share, to customer retention, share of wallet and of course revenue, but do all these things matter to your business, and if so how much do they matter? They should all matter of course, but maybe some less so than others. The best approach to defining how to deliver value back to your business is to create a formula that matches the core goals and ambitions of the business. This is easier to do in a smaller company, in larger organisations it may be more function or department oriented.

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Here's a matrix I use to help work out what the most important KPIs are for the business and how each is weighted accordingly so that you know you’re delivering the most important goals and ultimately value for the business.

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Although this can be applied retrospectively to a feature roadmap, it’s more useful if it’s done up front before the feature is in the backlog or delivery funnel.

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The 3rd row down is the percentage weighting. You can see here that the most heavily weighted column is with sales, not just revenue however, it’s important to take on board the value that ongoing relationships bring to the business above and beyond pure revenue, so in this case it’s sales and reputation … which you could also call brand loyalty if you are of a marketing persuasion.

Accept and commit

Each business is different with different objectives and goals but this formula can be applied to any business with a few column changes and wider acceptance of the weightings. I’ve used this formula with a “% already complete” column and also with an “importance to investors” column. For this to work you need to tap deep into your stakeholder management skills and get those accountable for each column’s KPIs to sign up to the methodology. You should collaboratively agree with each stakeholder what the initial value is, based on all available data points. After all, it’s that very data that will be used to keep projects and programmes on track. It’s your job as the product lead to validate one data point versus the other, everyone will try and suggest a score of 5 but your impartiality and loyalty to the business goals gives product the final say.

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Make sure this is reviewed frequently as part of the wider planning governance in your business but also as a reminder to project teams of what the company values the most from its list of deliverables (I deliberately avoided saying “list of priorities because many believe priority has no plural??)

Let me know if you want the template, happy to share a basic formula.