I've often witnessed this pervasive idea that prioritising product features is fundamentally about compromise. You sit down in a room and work out what you can get away with not doing.
You're essentially deciding which corners to cut because time will run out and your budget will vanish before you can do everything.
That's bollocks.
Prioritisation is one of the most creative acts in product development. You're not taking your grand vision and cutting out fluff, making it not that grand in the process. Through prirotisation, you're clarifying it.
So before we talk about prioritisation, we need to talk about grand vision. Strategy.
And let me tell you. Strategy and roadmap just aren't the same thing. One's a list of features. It's not even a plan, really. The other is your thesis about how you create value for your customers.
With product strategy, you're answering what problem you're solving, for whom and why will your approach work better than everything else available.
That sounds simple, but it isn't.
Good strategy requires you to make real hard choices. But most product strategies are just wish lists dressed up in business language. So they ultimately fail.
But when you have a genuine strategy, prioritisation becomes something different entirely. Prioritsation is the mechanism through which your strategy, your grand vision, manifests in the real world.
It feels like this shouldn't be said. I'll say it anyway.
Priority is singular.
It comes from the Latin prior, meaning "first." For centuries, the word had no plural. You had a priority. That one thing that came first.
Then businesses got hold of it and gave us "priorities," which is a bit like having multiple "firsts." It became a way to avoid picking a first. To avoid making hard choices. This happened because priority, in Latin, refers to sequence: which comes first. But in business language, it became akin to importance. And since multiple things can be important at the same time, priority became priorities and things went haywire.
But let's think about it in terms of importance then. Prioritisation means accepting that if everything is important, nothing is. It means understanding that doing five things adequately will almost always produce worse outcomes than doing one thing exceptionally well.
And here's where it gets interesting. Priority isn't only about importance or sequence. Priority means conviction. When you prioritise something, you're making a bet that this is the right path forward. You're backing your strategy with action.
See how we're coming back to that strategy thing, right?! How important it is to come up with a sound strategy first and have priortisation to back it up.
If strategy is done once, unless something unexpected happens, prioritisation is an ongoing process.
This is where I've seen most teams get it wrong.
They treat prioritisation as a quarterly ritual. They even tie it to their planning cycles. They gather in a room, argue about what matters, rank some features, then don't touch the priority list again for three to six months.
That's not prioritisation. That's just intermittent planning.
Prioritisation is continuous. Not in a way that creates chaos. After all, you're not re-ordering your backlog every day. But you should be constantly asking yourself. Is what we're building right now still the most important thing we could be building?
Reality keeps happening and you can't stop change.
Your users will behave in unexpected ways. Your competitors will ship things. The market will shift. You'll be bombarded with new information. If you're not willing to reassess when the context changes and you're stuck until the next planning session, you're just being stubborn.
That said, there's a balance.
You can't change priorities too often or you'll never finish anything. And you can't change them too rarely or you'll keep building the wrong things. So you need a way of knowing the difference between responding to genuine new information and just being distracted by the latest shiny object.
And that's the question everyone wants answered. And I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you. I don't have an answer. There's no universal framework that will do this for you.
You can score things on impact and effort. You can map them to strategy pillars. You can calculate cost of delay. These tools can be useful, yes. But they're not prioritisation. They're just ways of organising your thinking in a way that might lead you to prioritise.
That's because prioritisation requires judgment. Your judgement applied in your situation with your constraints.
It requires understanding your users deeply enough to know what matters to them. It requires understanding your business deeply enough to know what will actually move the needle. And it requires understanding your team deeply enough to know what you're capable of executing well.
But I don't want you to feel like you've read all the way here and are still in the dark. So here's what I've found works in more cases than not.
Start with the strategy. Not the roadmap. The thesis about value creation. Then ask what's the smallest thing you could build that would test whether this strategy is correct?
Careful! Not "what's the minimum viable product?" That question will lead you to cut corners. What's the most focused version of this idea? That's a different question entirely. You're looking for the essence, not how to reduce your idea to something else that someone out there might maybe like to use.
The essence is the thing that, if it works, validates your entire approach. And if it doesn't work, teaches you something valuable about where your strategy needs to evolve. That's what you want.
Let me say this again. Prioritisation is absolutely not about cutting corners.
When you cut corners, you're taking a complete idea and reducing it to save time or money while still shipping it in time to meet your arbitrary deadline. You're making it worse on purpose. And you're hoping users won't notice the difference. And if they do, you call it version 1.0 and promise improvements later.
That's not what prioritisation does. Prioritisation doesn't degrade anything. It focuses everything.
But wait, you say! If I prirotise everything like this, I'll never please marketing. Or I'll never get it past the design team. Or some other department that thinks it's the most important. That's okay. Prioritisation is not about making everyone happy. You will disappoint people. You will face push-back. Everyone will argue that their thing is the most important.
It's all uncomfortable. And necessary. I mean, that's how we got carousels on the web. When some company decided to please everyone and letting them think their thing was just as important.
In fact, if your prioritisation process never produces any disappointment, you're probably not actually making hard choices. You're probably just doing everything. Slowly and poorly.
The teams that build the best products aren't the ones who do everything. They're the ones who do a few things so well that everything else becomes irrelevant.
That's what prioritisation makes possible.
So what does prioritisation have to do with accessibility?
I argue that accessibility isn't something you prioritise. More on this in the next emails.