How to Prioritize a Roadmap

There are two ubiquitous pieces of advice  on how to prioritize a product roadmap. Unfortunately, both are useless.

The first is to create a spreadsheet to list all your ideas, and score each one by how much it will cost to build and how much impact it will have. Then, sort them so that the ideas that have the most impact for the least effort show up at the top, like this:

There are a million variants of this framework, but none of them helps you with what is hard about prioritization: coming up with good ideas and accurately predicting what would happen if you decided to pursue them. When you’re filling out numbers in a spreadsheet, it can feel like a shot in the dark.

When asked how to deal with this problem, experienced product leaders will often proffer the second piece of ubiquitous-yet-useless advice, saying something along the lines of, “It’s more art than science” or, “Just go with your gut.”

Is there anything we can learn that helps us get better at prioritization?

I have 10 (hopefully non-useless 😏) theses that help us understand why prioritization is hard, and how to get better at it.

1. Prioritization isn’t about prioritization

You don’t get good at prioritization by learning frameworks to help you sort a list of ideas. Instead, you master it by learning general and domain-specific business knowledge. Efficacy is mostly a function of talking to customers to understand what they want, or talking to engineers and designers to understand how your product is architected, or learning new techniques from research or peers. Once you know these things, prioritization is easy. Without them, it’s impossible.

2. Prioritization is where every skill related to company building converges into a single choke point

Engineers will bring their perspective about how the codebase is scaling. Designers will focus on all the confusing and inconsistent parts of the UI. Product managers will come with AB test ideas to move the metrics they’re responsible for. But in order to decide what should be done (and what shouldn’t), someone has to integrate all this knowledge.

3. Generalists beat specialists at prioritization