UX for Business

How to Prioritize

VDP Is a Great Way to Prioritize Your Work

Never discuss work in terms of “good” or “bad” ideas. That is a sure sign that you are prioritizing based on stupid criteria.

If you search for “prioritization frameworks,” you will find many. They are just ways of deciding what is important now and what isn’t, and most are very academic or complex. In my experience, simple methods are usually better in practice.

VDP is everything you need for prioritizing your work:

• V = Value. Creating new value is extremely...uh...valuable. Luckily it is also rare. So, when you have a well-researched opportunity to create real value, you should prioritize it first. Most good products will usually only create fundamental value in two or three ways, at most. The rest is details and supporting features.

• D = Diagnosis. Once you have the fundamental blocks of value in place, the next most valuable thing you can do is make them work properly, for example, taking your product from a beta test version to a real version one. Diagnostic work tends to add a lot of value and increase business results enough that other people will notice but doesn’t create new types of value.

• P = Probability. When you are creating value and have diagnosed most of the “big” issues and your product is running smoothly (version 2 or 3, for example), the longer-term work will focus more on improving probabilities. ...