Digital Possibilities

by Richard Beck

Product Management for Agile Businesses: Scoring and Prioritizing

Prioritizing the work to be done in a small business can make the difference between business failure and success. Build the wrong thing, and there can be no second chances, build the right thing and you make a huge difference to the business.

Many small businesses have many competing demands for their available resources. These can come from customers that can be too big to lose, changes in the market place, opportunities, that extra feature you need to close a sale…. how do you decide between all of these different competing demands? And worse, how do you avoid switching between different initiatives and never really bringing any to completion?

The Product Management Lifecycle

At this point it’s worth reviewing the Product Management Lifecycle and understanding how Signals and Candidates play their part.

Product Management Lifecycle

• Signals: Ideas for product improvement. We call these signals as they may be interesting or not, but are indicating there is something we should be paying attention to.
• Validation: Determine what signals should be a candidate for Development.
• Development: Find and develop a solution to the challenge posed in a candidate.
• Go To Market: Launch your solution in the market place. Adoption: Track your solution to make sure it is being used as expected by your targets.

Strategic Planning Theory

Without wanting to go into a lot of detail around strategic planning, it’s important to have in mind the basic elements of that theory. Without some modicum of strategy, strong prioritization becomes exceedingly difficult.

There are different frameworks that exist to help with strategic planning, such as the Lean Canvas or those from MBA programmes that look at internal and external factors. What they all tend to have in common is the analysis of what a business can do well, with what’s happening in the markets it serves and then understanding where there is opportunity — so called “blue water” with little competition, and determining where the business is strong.

The ideal markets will enable it to tackle a problem that is currently not being tackled well or at all, where you can erect barriers to entry & exit, and where you have the capabilities internally to execute well.

As an example, think of the Apple iPod. Apple was not the first digital music player on the market, but they were able to create a better product both in hardware terms and software terms, bring their power to create an online Music Store which created barriers to exit; and they had the competence internally to execute well.

When one looks at our own business, what should come out of the strategic planning session is a strong notion of what the principle strategic goals of the company are. They may be to break into new geographic or vertical markets, they may be to increase penetration of an existing one, they may be to increase customer satisfaction and decrease churn, they may be to reduce costs and be more operationally sound, or to increase integration with customers. The objectives of every business will be different, and they are likely to change overtime. However at any one particular point, you should have about four to six key goals.

These goals are absolutely essential to the prioritization process as they are what a candidate must be considered against.

What to do if You Have no Clear Objectives?

In my considered option, a Product Manager cannot do their job of prioritizing new features and offerings if they does not have clear objectives to prioritize against. Otherwise they are just blindly throwing mud against the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

If you don’t have objectives, then ask for them! If your executive team is unable to provide them (and there can be many good reasons for this), then determine yourself what you believe the objectives should be, share them with the executive team, and let them know this is what you will be prioritizing against. I am sure that will spur them to action!

Scoring and Prioritizing Backlog Candidates

Once you have your set of objectives, you can apply them to your idea candidates and hence prioritize your list. Let’s say that you have a set of objectives:

• Increase revenue
• Improve market position
• Increase efficiency
• Increase customer value

Every candidate can then be scored against each of these objectives on a scale of 1–5. For example, in an earlier article, an example was given of a new report that was requested. This request can then be scored as:

• Increase revenue-1
• Improve market position-2
• Increase efficiency-0
• Increase customer value-3

Giving a total of 6 points. Naturally, the candidate will then be sorted against all other candidates who may have higher or lower scores.

The Weaknesses in Scoring

There are weaknesses in this approach, clearly. In an ideal world, every candidate would be subject to a financial analysis that would indicate the expected revenue generated. For small businesses however, the costs and loss of agility would make this approach unfeasible.

Also there is some level of judgement that is required in attributing the correct score on each point. It is recommended that the scoring be done in a small cross-functional committee with representatives from the executive body, engineering, sales and customer success, as well as product. That is also a great way to get buy-in across the board and provide a high-level of transparency.

How to Manage Scoring

Scoring ideally would be done in a specialist tool that enables this, such as ProductRoadmap or ProductBoard. While spreadsheets can be used for this function, they do not scale well and it can be difficult to track discussions and why different decisions were made.

Within ProductRoadmap for example, each candidate can be scored: Scoring in ProductRoadmap

Candidates can be sorted by score: Candidate List

And you can provide feedback to Signal creators on the value that their ideas and opportunity assessment has generated for the business. Value created by a reporter in ProductRoadmap

Header image by Element 5 Digital via Unsplash