The reality of building products is that you can never get everything done—you need to ruthlessly prioritize the initiatives on your roadmap before you run out of resources.
As a product manager (PM), your responsibility is to make sure your team is working on the most important things first.
This chapter helps you understand the basics of product roadmap prioritization with a step-by-step framework for deciding which features deserve your team’s limited time, resources, money, and energy.
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Prioritization and product teams
Building a product roadmap is exciting. You start to picture all the amazing places your product could go, the results it could generate, and what the best case scenario is. But as a PM, you need to be the voice of reality.
Product roadmap prioritization helps you focus on the things that matter most, ensures resources are used efficiently, and supports product growth.
How to prioritize your product roadmap is a big decision—and a challenging one. You’re choosing the future path of your product, and helping pick features you know your customers will love—and that will help the company grow.
Here are four guiding principles and challenges that product teams face in learning to prioritize product roadmaps:
1. Roadmap prioritization is about choosing what, when, and why to build
A product roadmap helps you effectively plot out the execution of your product strategy. But figuring out what to build first (and second, and third) can be a challenging part of the job
- Do you focus on really big, high-impact features, or do you prioritize getting a range of little ones done fast?
- Should you invest in the platform or risk racking up more technical debt?
- Is it better to prioritize features aimed at attracting new customers or satisfy the ones you already have?
Choosing the right initiatives to work on means prioritizing from your long list of good ideas. You’re looking for what’s most important, realistic, and urgent.
Product roadmap prioritization ensures your high-level business objectives and product vision come together, and guides you through times of uncertainty—without letting opinions and ideas lead you off course.
2. Who’s involved in product roadmap prioritization?
Product roadmap prioritization stars with a shared vision and purpose among product managers, teams, and stakeholders. But that’s not where it ends.
It's important for everyone involved to see the big picture, but there’s always a possibility of reaching stalemates and decision deadlock on what to do next. The reality of product development is that not everyone can have equal say in what initiatives are prioritized. Yes, you’re working with good, smart people. But not everyone has the context needed to make major product decisions.
PMs are responsible for ensuring that a product meets customer needs and achieves the company's desired results. They should have final say in how to execute that strategy. This involves business justification, marketing, research, design, and everything in between—pretty much all the stages of a product’s lifecycle.
💡 Pro tip: get the entire team and stakeholders involved at the ideation stage. When you prioritize features, you need to act as a collaborative leader. A good opportunity to exercise this is at the ideation stage of your product roadmap strategy. Give everyone on the team a chance to share their best ideas. Run brainstorms, meet with opinionated team members, and get ideas from C-level stakeholders. You can even collaborate quickly and easily by leaving comments in session replays, where your team gets to review real users interacting with your product to inspire ideas. Getting input from everyone—especially the most passionate stakeholders and team members—helps prevent them from throwing a wrench in the roadmap later. Contentsquare lets you share and leave comments in session replays so your team can align and collaborate around a single customer view |
3. There’s more to product roadmap prioritization than just features
Product roadmaps involve more than just feature prioritization. Designing a winning product roadmap means prioritization happens at different levels:
- Strategy: prioritize on the high-level initiatives for the product
- Architecture: prioritize platform technologies, scalability considerations, interoperability challenges, etc.
- Release: prioritize sprints, features, user stories, epics, and bugs
- Goals: prioritize metrics, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to evaluate and track progress toward the objectives
At all these levels, prioritization is performed using a combination of data, instinct, and consensus among stakeholders. Which leads us to our next point.
4. Product roadmap prioritization is about data, not opinions
Teams that build products based on internal opinions prioritize the features and initiatives they think would be a good idea—and hope it works out. They make decisions based on their own opinions, rather than data-informed, educated hypotheses.
To be successful, product roadmap prioritization can’t be personal, which means not making prioritization calls based entirely on:
- Gut reactions: following your gut leads to product decisions not being tied to strategic goals
- Sales and support requests: prioritizing based on sales and support requests leads to priorities being driven by the loudest executives or the latest sales prospects
- Stakeholders questioning prioritization: prioritizing based on stakeholder pushback often involves an unproductive combination of executive and personal bias
Making a decision based on an opinion or feeling might work out sometimes, but it’s not a scalable or repeatable process for a product team to build on. Data, on the other hand, is.
Actionable data is essential to prioritize roadmaps. It can be used to discover trends, uncover bugs, develop better experiences, and plan productive product roadmaps that deal with what matters most.
Using the right quantitative and qualitative data helps you prioritize new product features and fixes—no guesswork involved. This gives you the insights needed to prioritize product features that drive results, and see which ones need to be deleted or archived.
By using data, you’re not picking someone’s idea over someone else’s. You’re making the right move for your company’s customers, strategy, and product goals.