Prioritization for Product Managers: How to Build the Right Product

The stakes involved in a Product Manager's decision may not always be as high as a life and death situation (although a PM in healthcare can face this kind of decision). I remember telling my team that people are dying from not using the Meck Health app and for almost two weeks everyone was making fun of it. "Fix the bugs faster so that we don't kill people", etc.

However, prioritization is crucial for various reasons especially because you aren't the one that's going to build the product alone and you're not the customer. Prioritization, when done properly will help you work with your team to build/work on the right product or product features.

We would be sharing two of the strategies & techniques that help successful Product Managers prioritize effectively. Working on the right product can impact virtually every aspect of the business:

• fewer support tickets because repeated customer issues were categorized and prioritized
• shorter sales cycles because the product speaks to the pain points/need of the ideal customer
• lower churn rate because people aren't dumping your solution for a competitor
• shorter sales cycles result in higher customer acquisition
• fewer support tickets results in higher customer satisfaction scores, customer lifetime value and Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Prioritization is beginning to sound like the holy grail. You need to keep these two things in mind no matter the technique that you are working with when prioritizing:

1. The customer needs must be at the centre of what you are working on. Product Managers must cure themselves of the bias of how they see the world. You're likely not your customer. The key here is to be customer-centric. I have an article on Customer Centricity here .

The bottom line:

• Who are your customers?
• What are their strengths and weaknesses?
• What jobs are they hiring your product for?
• What are the desired outcomes of those jobs?
• What constraints are on your customers?

You will provide answers to these questions by listening to and studying your customers carefully.

2. The goals and mission of your organization. Hopefully, your organization's goals almost directly align with your customer needs. Product managers always ask 'why' until they understand. 'Why' does your organization exist?

From the onset, you can begin to define and visualize a stellar product roadmap that aligns with your Objective and Key Results.

However, there's one more thing I consider very useful and that's Negotiation and Effective communication. Product Managers don't boss over anyone. Thus, you have to learn how to influence through negotiation and effective communication. Your negotiations must be based on the first two things we mentioned i.e. ideal customer needs and alignment with organizational goals.

The other thing I want to talk about is data and then the methods for prioritization.

Where do you find the right data? It depends on what you want to achieve. You ultimately need to have specific questions that certain kinds of data will provide the answers to. We'll talk about data elaborately in a different article.

Methods for Prioritization

There are different ways to effectively prioritize as a Product Manager. What prioritization techniques to use depends on the stage of the product, preference and other factors. Here are two of the best:

KANO MODEL

Kano Model is based upon the following:

Customer's satisfaction with our product’s features depends on the level of Functionality that is provided (how much or how well they’re implemented);

Features can be classified into four categories;

You can determine how customers feel about a feature through a questionnaire.

Satisfaction vs. Functionality

Kano proposes two dimensions to represent how customers feel about our products:

– one that goes from total satisfaction (also called Delight and Excitement) to total dissatisfaction (or Frustration);

– and another called Investment, Sophistication or Implementation, which represents how much of a given feature the customer gets, how well we’ve implemented it, or how much we’ve invested in its development.

The Four Classifications of Features

• Performance: Some product features behave as what we might intuitively think that Satisfaction works: the more we provide, the more satisfied our customers become.
• Must-be: Other product features are simply expected by customers. If the product doesn’t have them, it will be considered to be incomplete or just plain bad. This type of feature is usually called Must-be or Basic Expectations.
• Attractive: There are unexpected features that, when presented, cause a positive reaction. These are usually called Attractive, Exciters or Delighters.
• Indifferent: These are features whose presence (or absence) doesn’t make a real difference.

Kano Model depends on a questionnaire for determining the various points within the attached graph. However, because customers may not always know what features they want, you will have to ask standard user interview questions while having the Kano Model of prioritizing and categorizing the answer in mind.

However, if you have reasonable data that suggests that your customers know exactly what they want, then you can ask them these questions from the Kano Model:

• how they feel if they have the feature;
• how they feel if they did not have the feature.

And provide these options for them to choose from:

• I like it
• I expect it
• I am neutral
• I can tolerate it
• I dislike it

The pattern that is derived from asking a sample size of customers and analyzing will suggests what your priorities should be.

Well, you may be asking, how do I get those features I will use to ask the questions? Or this method doesn't consider things like how long or how much resources it will take to have the feature ready?

For the first question, I'll say follow the data closely. It will lead you. Although for the data to lead you as I mentioned earlier, you must ask certain questions. Some of those questions are questions like what kind of support ticket is raised consistently over a period of time or what are the top reasons the sales team are selling or not selling? And so on. We will have the time to talk more about Data and data analytics for Product Managers.

With respect to what resources it will take to create a feature or product since you may not have all the resources in the world, you can combine the Kano method of prioritization with the next technique I will share.

SCORECARD

The scorecard helps set your priorities in terms of the available resources, getting team/stakeholder buy-in and knowing what's possible within a given period. It's a table showing each feature's impact and effort/cost required to achieve the Objectives & Key Results (OKR).

You used the Kano method to learn from your data what features will help you achieve your Objectives & Key Results (OKR). You need to be able to execute. If you have 100 engineering hours for instance in a month, you will not be able to work on all features, bugs, etc if they require 300 engineering hours to complete.

Work closely with your stakeholders to define the weight (i.e., the criteria to be met by such feature). So if a feature has a weight of 60 and another has 45 then it means the first has a higher impact.

Lastly, you and your stakeholders will score each feature to show the amount of work it will take to be done. For example, creating an analytical dashboard to show everything the app does might require more time to work on than changing the colour of a button.

Be comfortable making iterations. Based on how your product, business or company is structured, you may need to fine-tune often even as you execute and learn from your customers and stakeholders.