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A Theme For This Week

The questions I have selected for this week are all about prioritizing requirements. How does product management figure out what the top priorities are amid the jumble of suggestions? Who gets a say in prioritizing new features?

So let's see what our readers have on their minds.

Dear Product Manager,

When I work with our VPs to prioritize requirements, there's always a huge amount of disagreement about whether bugs or enhancements should take priority. If we fixed all the bugs before doing any enhancements, we'd never put anything new in the software. How do you handle this?

— Really Bugged About It

Dear Really Bugged,

It's a safe assumption that your competitors are continuing to add to and improve their products. If you only fixed the bugs and didn't continue to add new features, at some point your product would be at a distinct competitive disadvantage. So how do you decide whether a bug is higher priority than an enhancement? The method that I have seen work best is to allocate a certain percentage of development time to bug fixing. You then prioritize the bugs within the bug list, and work your way as far down the list as the allocated time allows. One sanity check for this: does your allocated time allow for fixing most or all serious bugs?

When prioritizing, you're better off prioritized bugs and enhancements separately.

— Signed, Product Manager

Dear Product Manager,

At our company, setting the priorities on product requirements seems to lead to endless rounds of arguments. When enhancement suggestions are sent to me, I assign a priority (usually the person making the suggestion says it's high priority, but I often judge it to be lower than that), and we seem to spend an inordinate amount of time debating priorities every time the list gets updated. I try to get lots of people involved in the discussions to broaden the perspective, but priorities get shifted up and down several times and I wonder whether there's any point to the debates. How can we make the prioritization effort more productive?

— Debate Club Emcee

Dear Debate Club Emcee,

I think what's tripping you up is not the prioritizing itself, but understanding the best point in the product development release cycle to set priorities. Since setting priorities is a tough discussion in the best of times, involving hard choices between multiple appealing alternatives, you don't want to keep the topic open (and reopened) throughout the whole time you're gathering requirements. Besides, you'll only really be able to set the priorities when you have the full list of capabilities to consider for the upcoming release. Setting priorities should be an effort that takes place as you move to planning the next product release.

What has helped me immensely has been to distinguish between priority and value. Value is, for example, the business or technical improvement that comes from an enhancement. Priority, in contrast, is how important that enhancement is for the next release, relative to all the other enhancements proposed. When someone suggests an enhancement to you, work with them to define the value (and measure it numerically where possible, but that's a whole other story), which is then available for the team to consider when you set the priorities for the upcoming release.

Once you've set priorities for a release, the priority of requirements that don't make the release will be up for review again when the next release rolls around. But it's something you only need to do once for every release, rather than all the time. That should cut down on the debate!

— Signed, Product Manager

Dear Product Manager

I do a pretty good job of recording requirements in a consistent way, and several of my colleagues support my efforts to manage requirements. But I find that determining which requirements are the best, meaning which ones take priority, and figuring out which requirements are better than others, has been the most difficult part. It seems like there are tons of good ideas and we all have a hard time comparing them to one another. It feels like we waste a lot of time prioritizing the whole list of requirements relative to one another, when a lot of times it's just splitting hairs. It takes a lot of time and nobody's really satisfied that all the priorities have been correctly set.

— Priority Purgatory

Dear Priority Purgatory,

For your dilemma, I would think about the diminishing returns inherent in prioritizing the whole list. Specifically, I have always worked on products where there were far more requirements suggested than time to put them in the next release (or even five years of releases, sometimes). So once you have gotten past the number of requirements than can actually be developed for the upcoming release, it's kind of pointless to try to prioritize all requirements. I would start by prioritize items as high, medium, and low, aiming for a relatively equal number of each. Think big picture. Surely there are some you know would be high priority, and others which would be low. The ones where you're not so sure whether they're high or low can be set to medium. Then focus on the list of high priorities. How many of them can you do for the next release? 5? 25? Pick the top ones out of that list until you have enough to fill the development schedule for the next release.

But there may be another reason you find prioritizing requirements to be such a struggle. That's because it isn't simply about which feature is the best. What you're doing is choosing the features you want to put in this upcoming release. It could be because they're urgent, they could be very timely for the market, or requested by a major customer. A requirement could be a prerequisite for a very important new enhancement you want to put in down the road. High priority means that a given requirement is considered, not necessarily better, but more important for the next release, specifically. This approach will help you to focus on some of the practical considerations that would lead a given requirement to have a high priority.

Signed, Product Manager

Dear Product Manager,

Our problem is that most of our requirements are set as highest priority. We don't really have that many that get classified as lower priority, or even medium, so I wind up having to facilitate very unwieldy discussions that really frustrate the developers, because they feel that they get stuck trying to figure out the real high priorities. I feel the same way. How do we help people understand that not everything is always going to be top priority?

— It's All Good

Dear It's All Good

Yep, by definition, priority is relative, and only certain requirements are going to make it to the top of the list. I worked with a developer who, when faced with a list of requirements which were all high priority, said: "You realize that by putting these all at high priority, you're handing it over to me to make the judgment call about which ones to put into the next release, right?" That helped get people off the dime to choose the things they really, really wanted next.

When I'm driving around with my sons and see a new store, with a cool sign, a good idea, but a location that's not particularly high traffic, I always tell them: "If I ever decide to open a restaurant or a store, remind me to do that only if the location is outstanding. If the location is just good, talk me out of it, please!" I suggest using that same principal to find the truly top priority requirements. For each requirement, ask: "Is this an outstanding, amazing idea?" Not good, not clever, but outstanding. If it is, then it gets a high value assigned to it, and probably a high priority. Everything else is medium priority or lower. The one exception here is for requirements that are necessary to upgrade the technology or because they were promised to a customer. That should winnow your list down quickly. Then, if you can still accommodate more requirements in the release, look at the next tier and pick out the best ones of the lot.

— Signed, Product Manager

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