Prioritisation techniques for product managers

There are a number of different techniques you can use to prioritise tasks within your team.

Prioritisation is one of the main challenges faced by product managers when building a product roadmap or planning work for their team. As product managers, the questions that you will constantly need to deal with are:

• what to work on first
• how you make that decision

There are often many different possibilities as to what you can do, but people and time are limited resources. It is not possible to do everything or fix everything.

Do you let your developers work on something they like or choose the big, difficult task that no one wants to do? Is it better to work on an easy fix for a quick result or the big update to your product that will improve efficiency? Do you tackle the issue that some of your users are always complaining about or do you prioritise implementing the suggestions from your senior stakeholders?

Product managers use several common techniques to decide what to prioritise. They are:

• Must, Should, Could, Would not (or Will not)’ – often abbreviated as ‘MoSCoW’
• prioritisation matrices, such as the value/risk matrix
• Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort – often known as the ‘RICE score’

Each of these techniques has its own advantages and disadvantages and product managers will use them in different situations.

As you gain more experience as a product manager, you will learn how to choose the best method or methods. Effective prioritisation is about knowing how the different methods work so you can adapt them to the needs of your team and your current project.

We will learn more about these 3 techniques in the next step.

Task

Are you already familiar with any of these techniques? Share your thoughts on these or other prioritisation techniques with fellow learners in the comments below.