Simple Prioritization Framework
As a product manager, we are often called upon to assist or lead prioritization efforts in the roadmaps we build. Fortunately, there are a great many prioritization frameworks out there that can help us achieve this goal. As you assess which framework best serves your needs, you’ll notice that there are some fairly involved frameworks that can be challenging to understand as well as some frameworks that are aimed at getting you started right away. In this article, we are focusing on one of the lightweight prioritization frameworks in ‘effort versus value’.
The effort versus value prioritization framework is meant to be a quick approach to prioritization. Depending on your organization or where you are in your product lifecycle, this framework might be all you need to get your roadmap prioritized. However, there is a chance that you may need to conduct additional analysis upon completion of this framework depending on the feedback you receive. In any case, this particular approach is a great place to start and help you on your prioritization journey.
Effort & Value Defined
When thinking about the effort versus value prioritization framework, you first need to define what each of these metrics mean.
Effort is your attempt to quantify the amount of work that will be involved in building your feature or achieving your stated outcome. Quantifying effort can be done in a number of ways. For example, you can quantify effort using t-shirt sizing, story points, time units to complete, or even the estimated number of people required to build the item. Additionally, you should always consider consulting other teams or disciplines to assist you in estimating the effort involved to build the item in question.
Value is the estimated return or impact that you expect to see upon building your feature or in achieving your desired outcome. For example, the estimate of value could be the number of new users expected to interact with your new feature or possibly the return on investment expected when rolling out this new item. Similar to effort, value can be captured in a number of ways and will most likely vary depending on your industry.
Effort vs Value Captured
Now that we have defined and framed our effort versus value approach, we can move forward with illustrating it in practice.
Below, you will see a four quadrant graph that shows our effort versus value framework depicted visually. Effort is shown on the horizontal axis while value is on the vertical axis.
As you can see in the graph, each of the quadrants have been labeled as follows:
Quick Wins - upper left quadrant
Big Bets - upper right quadrant
Nice to Have - lower left quadrant
Time Sink - lower right quadrant
The reason we label each of these quadrants is so we can quickly assess where our features or outcomes fall in the graph after we have applied a value and effort estimate to each of them.
You may notice that there is an example outcome placed in each area of the quadrant. They arrived in each quadrant via the following estimates.
Outcome A - Small Effort, Large Value = Quick Win
Outcome B - Large Effort, Large Value = Big Bet
Outcome C - Small Effort, Small Value = Nice to Have
Outcome D - Large Effort, Small Value = Time Sink
Once you have your outcomes grouped and prioritized in each quadrant, you can now decide how best to organize them in your roadmap. Depending on the culture of the organization or the maturity of your product, you may alter your priority. For example, if your culture loves moonshot projects then the “Big Bets” quadrant might draw your attention at first. No matter where you find yourself,, you can feel confident that you have done your due diligence in applying critical thought to your roadmap prioritization.
Wrap Up
The effort versus value prioritization framework works best when you don’t want a heavyweight approach to your prioritization. It also works well when the goal is to seed a conversation with stakeholders around roadmap prioritization and engage in a healthy dialogue surrounding the reasoning behind the sequencing of items in the roadmap.
As with any prioritization approach, when you are able to provide real data behind the estimates it will result in each estimate carrying greater weight and clarity. Put another way, the more ‘fuzzy’ an estimate is the more it can be gamed and adjusted to align with any personal biases or agendas that may be present.
Prioritization is an extremely important activity for product managers. Whether you use this framework or any of the multiple other frameworks available, it is important to view your prioritization activities as a conversation and something that can be adjusted and revisited over time. How you prioritize your roadmap is a view into your roadmap execution strategy.