With so many opportunities competing for scarce resources, how to prioritize features is always a difficult topic and yet one of the most important jobs for product managers.
The engineers are telling you one thing, management is telling you another. You need to understand the difference between what’s important but not urgent, and what’s urgent but not important.
There are many ways to approach feature prioritization that I thought it would be useful to put together a set of resources on this topic.
An in-depth overview of 20 product prioritization techniques that can be an excellent starting point on the topic.
The techniques are classified along two axis : from internal to external and from qualitative to quantitative. From the Kano Model to MoSCoW, from Opportunity Scoring to Story Mapping, you will find what seems to me like a very thorough selection of great techniques to fit your needs and your strategy.
More than 100 frameworks to help prioritize features and projects for products. Along with numerous examples of slides and diagrams and organized in several sections (grids, scoring, processes, etc.), it is impressively thorough and can be of great help to Product Managers.
Product Management requires a lot of saying NO. But how are we sure it’s a NO? There can be a precious YES in a haystack of thousand NOs. How can we filter all the noise? And how can we prevent the people suggesting features from getting frustrated when their ideas are not being incorporated?
Here’s a short practical guide.
In this great article, Andrew Quan suggests "a few steps you can take to quickly understand whether to accept or reject incoming requests, as well as a method for communicating a “Positive No” that is both respectful and solution-oriented".
This is a question that all B2B startup founders have to answer at some point.
How much deviation in the roadmap can you accept to win a new customer?
This very pragmatic post proposes some good arguments on the conditions under which this kind of deviation can be quite acceptable, and those that justify refusing it.