Product Management in Practice, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. Prioritization: Where It All Comes Together

As we’ve discussed in the preceding chapters, there are many defensible ways to tread water before making an important decision. You can make big, impressive PowerPoint presentations! You can get into serious, intense debates about the difference between “mission” and “vision”! You can bury yourself in dashboards and insist that you “need more data”!

But sooner or later, there are some important questions you will need to answer with your team: What do you build? How much of it do you build? How will you know if it is successful? What should you not build? In fact, what should you stop supporting altogether?

These questions often come to a head during a process broadly referred to as “prioritization.” This is when you sit down with your team to figure out what you’re actually going to do for the next finite period of time. You may be pulling in user stories from an existing backlog, or you may be working with your team to identify and scope new ideas. But whatever you’re doing, you will have to make some important decisions. And you will never feel like you have enough information to make those decisions with the degree of confidence and certainty that you desire.

It is in this process of prioritization that goals, strategy, metrics, experiment results, and just about everything else we’ve discussed all come together. Unfortunately for you, the picture they form might be a wholly inconsistent, confusing, and contradictory ...