Strategic Prioritization
'Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.'
– Richard Rumelt
While we are all aware by now that a good product strategy needs to create focus, we stopped talking about focus when we get into execution mode. When have set our focus in our product strategy but go all over the place when executing on the product strategy, we will not build successful products. We need to ensure that we keep focus when we execute on the product strategy.
Therefore, whenever we make prioritization decisions, we need to start from strategy and work our way down to the backlog level through a cascade of decisions.
I ran an in-house talk where I talked about "Strategic Prioritization". After sharing a screenshot of my slides (see image below) on LinkedIn my followers asked me to run the presentation or share a recording of it. Because I took it literally and ordered the slides in form of a cascade.
Not letting them down on their request, I recorded the presentation and would love to give you access to mental models in prioritization and the cascade of decisions that you can go through to prioritize your backlog items in a strategic way.
Enjoy the video, and let me know what you think.
And here you can download the slides from the presentation:
Strategic Prioritization Slides
.pdf
Download PDF • 472.27MB
After the "Thank you" slide, you'll find a collection of some well known prioritization techniques.
If you want to learn more about prioritization techniques, my most favorite collections are:
from Folding Burritos: 20 Product Prioritization Techniques: A Map and Guided Tour
from Productboard: Product Prioritization Frameworks
and my mini-series on practical application of some of these (and other) prioritization frameworks: 9 Product Prioritization Techniques From the Real-World Perspective