Prioritization is essential for ordering both our personal life and our work. To make sure that we won’t miss any of the most important things.
For example, suppose that we need to organize a birthday party at home with six eight-year-old kids.
What do we need to do? here is a list of tasks,
- Book Birthday cake
- Buy Birthday party decoration
- Shop the groceries for the dinner
- Decorate the house
- Pick up the Birthday Cake
- Shop the material for kids activities
- Organize kids activities
- Blow the balloons
- Decide the dinner recipe
- Cook Dinner
- Prepare red colour plates
If you were the organizer, how do you prioritize them? Think about the factor you consider and list them out before you continue reading.
There is no right or wrong answer, just a practice to help you understand how you usually prioritize things.
For me, I would consider,
- #1 the urgency of the task — to identify tasks, need to do first
Is “Book Birthday cake” urgent? Yes, if we don’t book now, we can’t be able to pick it up on the birthday date.
- #2 the importance/value of the task -to delete some unnecessary ones
Do you feel “Prepare red colour plates” important? Probably not, we can use plates with different colours for a birthday party, who will care about the plates’ colours.
How much value do the balloons bring to a birthday party? And compared to the pollution to the earth, are we ok not to have the balloons for the party? Absolutely yes.
- #3 the dependencies of the tasks — to find the sequence of the tasks
For example, if we don’t book the birthday cake first, we can’t pick it up. If we don’t have a dinner recipe plan, it will probably be hard to buy groceries.
- #4 Anything missing from the list? — to find missing tasks to add
Oh, I forget the birthday bags. I should put them somewhere near the front door to pick them up when they start leaving.
After all these considerations, we may have a list with orders,
- Book Birthday cake
- Decide the dinner recipe
- Plan kids activities
- Buy Birthday party decoration
- Shop the groceries for the dinner
- Shop the material for kids activities
- Decorate the house
- Pick up the Birthday Cake
- Cook Dinner
- Put Birthday bags in the corner of the front door(new)
- Blow the balloons(deleted)
- Prepare red colour plates (deleted)
Now you know the importance of prioritization and get a sense of how you prioritize your tasks.
Now back to our IT world. It is similar to our daily life, but the factors which impact the priority differs. The factors are different for different products or projects, and we should choose different methodologies fit for the prioritization work.
Suppose that we are in an Agile team, we use user stories to document our requirements, and we use Epic stories to represent the significant features that reflect the items in the roadmap.
How do we prioritize Epic features?
To prioritize the Epic feature is the same as defining a prioritized roadmap. This part is not our focus today. However, you can search for the RICE techniques and Value Effort matrix to get some idea of this level of prioritization.
How do we prioritize the user stories in the backlog?
Prioritization happens every day, especially during Backlog refinement, sprint planning. Here are a couple of techniques we can use.
- #1 Stories with higher business value have higher priority
Very commonly, the features with higher business value will come first. But it may vary as products prioritization must also follow the company vision and strategy.
But what is business value? Think about it before continuing.
“Business value” is just a concept. It doesn’t have a single definition. However, the following factors can help to measure the “Business value” for a particular organization,
- Revenue
- Profitability
- Market share
- Brand recognition
- Customer loyalty
- Customer retention
- Cross-selling ratio
- Campaign response rate
- Customer satisfaction
, etc.
When we talk about the business value of a user story, we may need to consider the factors listed above to evaluate. More precisely, we can build a custom formula to calculate the business value score.
You may find some of the user stories which don’t have any business values. They are from our imagination, and we can delete them for peace.
- #2 Stories in the Critical path have the higher priority
For each Epic, the user stories in the critical path are similar to the “MVP” stories of the Epic feature. We can not release this feature missing any of the user stories in the critical path.
You may also be able to find the missing user stories while you practice the critical path.
- #3 Stories with the smallest effort come first
We can use this method, especially when our team has limited time. For example, you have a big chunk of work going on in the team. When we do the sprint planning, we may find we have a little buffer left. It surely can’t afford big user stories. The little effort user stories in the backlog would be good to fit in the sprint.
Another scenario to use this rule is when your team has lots of bugs in the backlog, it is time to pick up some to gain some quick wins.
Prioritization can be very complicated in our product analysis. There is no universal method to apply for all products and all scenarios. We can keep learning and practice in our daily work and find the most efficient way for our team.
