hi, Anthony here! In this newsletter, I curate insights on how to build great products. You’ll improve your product skills with every issue.

Let’s get to it.

(Btw, my PM Discord group has 80+ members now. Come join!)

Prioritization Framework

(Insight from Productized Blog)

Prioritization sucks.

It happens as a result of either finite time or money and it’s inevitable that someone will be unhappy after a prioritization decision.

Let’s explore a framework to streamline decisions and keep the process transparent.

The GE-McKinsey Nine Box Matrix

Low customer pain means that the problem/feature should be completely deprioritized even if the team is well equipped to tackle the problem.

Medium customer pain generally means to add to the to-do list and in a case where the team efficacy is high, it’s a good bet to move ahead.

High customer pain also means a high reward for solving the problem. However, if the team is not structured correctly / lacking the correct resources, the ideal solution is to escalate and attempt to find the right resources. With medium and high team efficacy, it becomes a no-brainer to tackle these issues.

Let’s run through a couple of examples:

The site is running very slowly

• Speed is the killer feature. So slow loading is definitely high pain for the customer

• Team efficacy? Is this a front-end or back-end issue? Does the team have SREs with the right experiences? What’s the scope of the problem relative to the team size?

• If the other problems are mostly low and medium customer pain, then it makes sense to prioritize solving this first.

Adding new dynamic favicons for GitHub Pull Request pages

Jason Long @jasonlong

A little hack week project @notdetails and I just shipped.

October 24th 2017

39 Retweets341 Likes

• It’s hard to gauge customer pain for features like these. Likely filed away as low customer pain which is why it was a hack week project

• Team efficacy was high; only took two people a week to finish!

Adding translations within Uber app
https://www.uber.com/newsroom/seamless-pickups/
There are two different features here, let’s focus on the translation feature -

• Extremely high customer pain. With Uber’s different demographics within the US, building this directly unlocks more driver and rider supply. Easy decision to put this at the top of the priority list.

• High team efficacy as well given that this was part of a general redesign to the main Uber app and likely had multiple teams coordinating on implementation.

End Note

Thanks for enjoying The Product Person. I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. If this was shared to you, you can subscribe here.

❤️ Hit the heart button as well, it helps a lot.

Have a great day,
Anthony

(P.S. Anything I can help you with? Just reply to this email, I’ll respond)