Nice post on prioritization from Upworthy’s Head of Product, Mike Su (@biggiesu):
An Internet product manager has two jobs: (1) Figure out the right things to build (priority) and (2) figure out how those things should be built.
If you can figure out your decisions ahead of time without game-time pressure, you can create a framework that everyone can agree on ahead of time, which takes emotion and stress out of the equation. In the product world, this means setting out clear strategic goals and a framework to support that. Agreement on these strategic goals independent of specific projects means decisions can be justified based on how well they support those goals rather than some arbitrary reason.
The high-impact, low effort projects are the “No Brainer” projects we should do immediately. The high-impact, high-scope projects we call “High Risk Swings,” and we take a couple of those a quarter. The low-effort, low-impact projects we do as “Filler” projects when a developer has free cycles. And obviously the low-impact, high-effort stuff we avoid like Andy Reid avoids running the ball.
