Product strategy, prioritisation frameworks and responding to change

Product teams often face more opportunities than they can act on, with new ones arising all the time. This post explores the link between strategy and priorities, when prioritisation frameworks help or hinder, and how to empower teams to make smart, timely decisions as new opportunities emerge.

Why strategy must precede prioritisation

Effective prioritisation starts with a clear strategy. Without one, even high-value tasks can pull teams in too many directions, diluting impact and slowing progress.

If we prioritise without strategy, we focus on lots of different things that are highly valuable in their own right. But when we add them all together, they don’t add up to anything extraordinary. We fail to take advantage of limited resources to achieve maximum impact.

“If you prioritise everything, you prioritise nothing”.

What makes a good strategy

Vision describes the future we are trying to create. Strategy is the plan to achieve the vision.

A good product strategy includes:

• Small point of focus
• Applied to high value & under served user needs
• To get maximum leverage
• To deliver maximum impact
• At pace
• On route to achieving the vision

A good product strategy should answer questions like:

• How do we use our strengths to solve big problems for our target users?
• What are the many things we don’t focus on?
• What are the few things we focus our limited resources on?
• How do the small number of things we focus on combine together to be more than the sum of their parts and multiply impact?
• At a high level, what are the big steps forward we need to take to achieve the vision? How do we take the first step?
• How do we expect the competitive and technological landscape to evolve? How are we going to make the most of the opportunities these changes present?

Why I struggle with prioritisation frameworks

Product teams often lean on frameworks like RICE, WSJF and 2×2 grids to bring structure to prioritisation. Prioritisation frameworks are helpful when:

• Choosing between similar types of work with shared context
• Working in a larger organisation with many stakeholders
• There is enough data to confidently estimate
• The decision isn’t obvious

Often these conditions are not met. Especially in tech. Especially in smaller organisations.

Prioritisation frameworks I like

• Cost of delay. Value, urgency and effort are the three most important factors in prioritisation decisions. Cost of delay is based on these three things. John Cutler’s miro board workshop for cost of delay is a great way to work through this as a team. For a slightly more mathematical approach, check out this old blog post from me on how Government digital teams can use Cost of Delay to prioritise work (also works well for private sector teams). This framework makes more sense for teams in bigger organisations where there are more strategic goals and competing demands for the team’s time.
• Jobs to be done. Most of prioritisation is solving the right problem. One of my favourite ways to prioritise problems to solve for users is to understand their jobs to be done. The best jobs to focus on are ones where the user rates a job as important, but where they are not satisfied with their existing solution. The best way to get this data is by talking to lots of users, but I have also experimented with using jobs to be done surveys to gather this data quantitatively.
• Bespoke options tables. Most of the time, it is relatively easy to say “not yet” to new things that come up. But in fast moving environments, new opportunities or information can arise that make a fast change of direction the right decision. In these scenarios, I like to take a few minutes to knock up a decision table in Notion. I articulate a few options, the pros and cons of each, and my recommendation. I share it with the team, gather feedback, and document the decision in a decision log once it’s agreed.

Empowering teams to respond effectively to change

Embracing change

New opportunities will arise. To take advantage of new opportunities fast and at minimum cost, teams should:

• Delay decisions to the last responsible moment. Avoid making premature decisions. Instead delay commitment and keep important and irreversible decisions open until the cost of not making a decision becomes greater than the cost of making a decision.
• Respond to change. Embrace change by trying to minimise its cost. Reducing cycle time, queues, work in progress and batch size. Not planning in too much detail too far ahead. Starting discovery close to delivery and including the people who will do delivery in discovery. These are some of the ways we do this. Leaders need to strive to avoid re-prioritising work that has already started, but teams need to recognise that sometimes this is the right decision to make – either because new information came up, or with the benefit of hindsight, leaders made the wrong decision.
• Be transparent. Strategies, plans and decisions should be open where everyone can see them. They should be regularly communicated at an appropriate cadence. Even though long term plans change, they are still immensely valuable so we have a sense of where teams are heading and best bets on how to get there.

Decision making flow chart for when new things come up

Here is a decision making flow diagram that I have shared with my teams to help us make quicker prioritisation decisions.

In short: stay focused on strategic must haves and keeping the product operational. Let’s have a conversation if new opportunities as they arise.

Questions I like to ask when prioritising

Again with the transparency theme, I like to be open with teams about the questions I like to ask when picking between options. Here are some of my favourite questions to ask when new things come up.

Strategic fit

• Is this a side quest or part of the main mission ?
• Why do this now rather than 6 months time?

Lean thinking

• How can we deliver 80% of the value of this with 20% of the effort?
• What’s the MVP (where we do this as fast as possible so that we can fail fast and get value in hands of users early?)

Value. The impact this opportunity could have on our organisation or users

• Impact: is this a game changer? A quality of life improvement? How many users does it impact? How important are those users? Does it help us secure revenue? Is it aligned to our strategy?
• Confidence: how confident are we that doing this thing will deliver the value?
• Risk: does it reduce our exposure to risk? Or enable future opportunities?

Urgency. Something is urgent if doing it later reduces its value

• Deadlines (eg. for partners, or big publicity events)
• A bug that might blow up into something bigger if not fixed
• A competitor might get there first otherwise

Effort. What it will cost us to realise this value

• How much effort does this take?
• Effort from who?
• How risky are the above effort estimates?

Conclusion

Prioritisation is only effective when grounded in strategy. Frameworks can support good decisions, but they are no substitue for clarity and fast feedback loops. There is huge value in creating alignment, so that teams can move quickly and confidently in the right direction even when things changed. Focus, transparency and flexibility help teams stay focussed on building the right things.