How will you prioritize product requirements?

Saying NO to requirements is tough but knowing what to build when is very important and so in today’s article I would be focusing on that part only, let’s get started on our next article of this product series.

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First I would understand where the requirement is coming from, sometimes requirement coming from senior management needs to prioritize first. After analyzing it, there could be a few cases -

1. One of the live features stopped working (Code Phat gya :P)
2. A new feature introduced either by management or from self-analysis
3. Prioritize things from the backlog itself

The first priority would go to the first case only, no matter how important others are. Because this feature is already live and if the user got to know about this, then there would be a bad PR and even cause losses to the business.

So, now if I need to prioritize further then I would analyze all the stuff on the basis of the RICE framework. In this,

R(Reach) = It’s about how many users would be affected if we build this feature for a given period of time, for example - transactions per month.

I(Impact) = In this it would measure how big the impact would be on the users, we could divide this on a scale-like 3 means high impact, 2 means moderate, and so on.

C(Confidence) = This is about how confident are we (the Internal Product team) about the impact and reach of the feature/project. How much data or information do we have to back up those estimations?

E(Effort) = Most crucial i.e. how much effort our designers & engineers need to build this, one month, two months, or how much time exactly.

Now after finding all that data, we would apply the formula to calculate the overall score. the formal here is -

Score = Reach*Impact*Confidence/Effort

The bigger the score we get, the more value we will get by working on that feature and can focus on significant tasks, understanding whom we will impact, why, how, and how soon. One of the biggest cons of this method could be the estimations we make here might not be right every single time and may result in wrong decisions.

Another approach I may follow is Impact vs Effort simply, we can simply calculate the effort and impact and based on that can make the required decisions. This is one of the simplest approaches to start with and I would recommend using this only as it’s easy to figure out things in a faster & better way.

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