Product prioritization frameworks will waste your time

As product people, we’re taught to build features using product prioritization frameworks and spreadsheets.

We learned to assign specific quantifiable metrics to features - like what the customer impact will be, and how difficult the feature will be to build. Then we used those as a scoring mechanism to make decisions about what features to build and in what order.

These prioritization frameworks end up making us feel confident about our decisions and help us get buy-in from others.

In the past I would always use prioritization frameworks to make decisions about what to build.

But I’ve stopped.

At my company Nira, we’ve thrown all the feature prioritization frameworks out the window.

Instead, sequencing is the most important thing we do now.

Early on, we had very strong opinions (and signals) about what to build to solve the problem of unauthorized access to cloud documents.

We had talked to a number of IT professionals and knew about their three major pain points:

Lack of visibility into who inside and outside of the company had access to what cloud-based information.
Spending countless hours trying to fix access issues with insufficient ability to take action using existing admin tools.
A lack of context about the documents and who should have access to them, so they were constantly spending time asking employees

So we went straight after what we thought was the perfect solution.

We built an MVP of an employee security portal that would enable employees to manage who had access to their own information. We thought it would help educate employees, reduce unauthorized access to their documents, and save IT teams time and effort.

The more people we showed the employee-facing MVP we built, the more we understood that their most painful and basic problem was a lack of visibility. They kept asking us if they could see everyone in the organizations' documents instead of just their own.

We quickly realized that IT people weren’t ready to roll out an employee-facing security solution. They didn’t have any visibility themselves, so they had no idea what kind of can of worms they’d be unleashing on employees.

They had to experience and build trust in our solution themselves before they were comfortable deploying the tool across their entire organization.

If we continued down the path of building and trying to get usage for this perfect solution of ours, we’d have wasted a tremendous amount of time trying to get IT people to roll it out and most likely would have failed at doing so.

So we quickly shifted our focus to first building an app that would give IT and Security professionals full visibility and control over who had access to their company’s documents.

If we had started with a product prioritization spreadsheet, I have no doubt that we’d be at least a year behind where we are today. We would have built what we thought would add the most value for customers, give us the most potential for growth, and what was fastest to ship.

But that would have missed a key question: what do customers really need first?

We put the employee-facing product on hold. Even though it would have been the easiest and fastest thing for us to build. Even though it would have been right at the top of our (non-existent) prioritization spreadsheet.

We had to earn the right to build the perfect solution for IT and Security teams by building in the right order (sequencing). I’ll share even more of the details and lessons we learned next week.

Hiten =)

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Product prioritization frameworks will waste your time

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