Why overlooking communication in your product prioritisation process is asking for trouble

Communication is often the root of many problems in workplace yet it is often overlooked by many as a secondary process to the work you are executing. Big mistake, poor communication has ripple effects that upsets colleagues, breeds distrust and breaks down fluency in collaboration.

In this post I want to talk about how and why you should communicate your prioritisation process to stakeholders and the problems caused if you fail to communicate your workings properly. I will also run through my experience across small, medium and large tech companies and how I have tailored prioritisation frameworks to the audience at hand.

Firstly, what is a product prioritisation framework?

It is a framework to analyse the value that future epics and user problems will be worth should they be worked on. This could be sprints ahead or a quarter ahead, anything more than that is always a little too sketchy to predict. PM’s will be inundated with requests from multiple stakeholders as well as ideas of their own so the question is how can we accurately measure what will move our KPIs so we can prioritise the work ahead. We tend to use existing data and model out what impact certain epics could have if we were to action those changes.

What do we need to implement this?

Ask your the team the questions what KPI(s) are we moving in this quarter? This is a fundamental part because you need context, everything you do when analysing epics and problems should be related to the KPI(s). You should always be asking yourself, is this going to move the needle? If not, why are you working on it?

Why is it important?

Firstly, dev resource in every company is always highly sought after. Don’t waste development time by working on things that aren’t going to move the needle. With this framework you can have an accurate approximation of what impact a certain epic or problem will have so you can move the order around. Secondly, You also show your worth as a PM, your job is to work out what is going to move the needle, so in order to gain the respect of peers, to know that you are thinking properly about this, it’s critical to do this.

How can this be implemented and communicated

Corporates with multiple stakeholders

Audience Most likely to be heads of department who lead large teams made up of 100s of people. Changes likely to have big impact and affect people therefore detail is scrutinised. In some cases, stakeholders may not have tech background. High level of professionalism, stakeholders used to more formal processes. I learnt how to do this at my time at Marks and Spencer.com.

Use a detailed Framework How to do this?

Firstly, create a pre-read that you send out to all your stakeholders. Detail how they should prepare contributions to the roadmap using a template. (I go into this further down) Make sure the style of communication is open and inviting, you want to stimulate new ideas so don’t give the impression that they are already fighting an uphill battle.

Secondly, setup a session and introduce the framework using these key points.

KPIS — Detail your teams overall KPI’s with a target value you are aiming to achieve. This target should of course be derived from a model of your overall companies goals.

Vision — Explain what you are trying to achieve as a team, be ambitious but calculating, this is your chance to capture the audience and set the scene.

Development principles — Explain what principles the team are employing to reach their goals. It could be TDD, hypothesis driven testing, lean and iterate etc…The reason for this is to fill stakeholders with confidence, let them know you are using the most up to date techniques to achieve your goals.

Next, in the same session it’s now time to show what you have prioritised and why? Follow a format similar to the one below. Encourage stakeholders to ask questions, and to challenge, as you as the PM should have done your homework and be ready with the answers.

The template

We have listed the problem and epic to show stakeholders why we are working on this. We then give details into the problem using data and an explanation of what we will try to do without solutionising (leave that to the team). There may be impact on other teams so the considerations area allows you to inform the stakeholders of this upfront. It’s always good to include photos here, to bring this to life, otherwise the session could easily stagnate.

Detail your KPIS and the target you have calculated, I don’t usually go through my workings here as there’s often not enough time. In a company of this size, I’ve always had an analyst to check my data to ensure confidence across the business. Inform stakeholders of the predicted development size so they understand potential timescales and dependancies to notify if there are any blockers. It is also worth mentioning any spikes that you may be working on.

How did we communicate and why?

Email — We informed our stakeholders upfront that the session will take place at a specific time and place, and we gave them an template of how to communicate their ideas which includes requirements of having data where applicable. We also gave them an idea of what format the session will be so they know what to expect. We also made it clear that we want to hear strong ideas that are potentially leftfield as great ideas often come from varied backgrounds. We did this to create an environment where everyone is listened to providing they do their homework. This is clever, because it roots out people who shoot ideas from the hip and have not thought about them properly.

The session — We firstly opened with a vision and principles, this is to set context and allows people to learn more about your team. This is useful because you are taking them on a journey with you. Moving into the actual prioritisation, we then go through each story on the board and invite questions. This is very important as you are educating your stakeholders, they will ask why this and why that? Be prepared to tell them so they feel confident you are working on the right thing.

Conclusion: You have given them the format to contribute, you have then listened, analysed and fed back with a process that people understand. People then walk away from the room feeling satisfied that the team has proven what it is going to work on. I recommend doing this for a large company every quarter.

Established companies

Audience Most likely to be heads of departments who lead small teams made up of 10’s of people. You have more regular contact with these individuals. The process should be less formal but still structured and with plenty of analysis. The business is used to moving quite quickly so ‘back of the envelope’ maths can be used here to make sure you are not slowing things down. I will detail how I do this at JustGiving.

Use a lighter version of the framework above I’ll explain more below.

Setup an intro session — Talk to your stakeholders, show them the template you are going to use and why. Once again, encourage them to think big and to think about the KPIS we are trying to move.

Then another session for the team to present back — I would then encourage everyone to bring their ideas to the session in the template described to them. They can then present their idea and why they think its going to make an impact. It’s worth noting that some places may not have a huge analyst resource, so if other stakeholders can’t do analytics, you have to pick that up for stories worth pursuing. Once the ideas have been presented by the team, simply close off the session thanking them and then letting them know the analysis will come soon.

Do your analysis — Take the ideas that can have an impact on your KPI, depending on the time scale, then work out the potential impact. In order to ensure accuracy, I did the calculations as did my colleague who is an analyst and a strategist, we then compared them with each other and challenged the working out until we found the right answer. The important thing here is to find the right balance, don’t produce a report on your analysis, but show your working. We often do ‘back of the envelope’ maths as it allows us to move quickly.

Final session — We then brought the stakeholders back into the room to discuss the results. In this scenario, we actually showed our working which is different to the framework we used above. Encourage them to ask questions and challenge.

How did we communicate and why?

With smaller companies, it’s important to get lots of facetime, so a lot of the communication was done in person by seeding the session first, then taking them through the template and running through at the end. We did this so once again they felt bought in to the process and felt they could contribute. We also showed our working, as the stakeholders are usually much closer to the dataset you are using so this breeds confidence. At the end, we encourage people to keep contributing throughout the year, as it’s much quicker to turn analysis around.

Startups with a few stakeholders

Audience Most likely to be a handful of senior people or people with the most experience. You are constantly communicating and meeting regularly, so everyone is already quite aligned. Moving super fast so no time for anything formal.

Employ the most basic framework The key thing here is that you are more likely to have discussed ideas already, so as a PM you need to constantly keep analysing potential ideas to work out what is going to drive growth. Therefore it’s best to keep outlining informally the following questions to every idea worth pursuing.

• What’s the problem we are solving here?
• Is there any data?
• What’s the potential impact?

You may not have data to support all this, so you may need to use intuition at certain times.

Communication:

In terms of communicating, you are most likely to be talking all the time, so I’d just make sure that you are communicating what you are doing and the results.

What happens if you don’t communicate properly? (This applies to all company sizes)

• You infuriate people — Nobody likes finding out that something has been agreed without them being informed or consulted. This usually means that person will communicate that anger to another colleague which spreads unrest.
• Breed distrust — The result of being infuriated is usually distrust. The person then doesn’t trust the person in charge of prioritisation, and once again you have a negative environment where people don’t feel they are listened to.
• Stops creativity — If people don’t feel they are listened to, they don’t feel like contributing as much. SIMPLE
• Stops collaboration — If you are in an organisation where communication is poor, it’s most likely the case collaboration breaks down. People don’t want to see other people who they don’t trust, so any work will feel the affect of this.
• Harms your reputation — News spreads quickly in organisations, this will have impact on your future.
• You don’t build the right thing — Don’t have buy in with the right people, you don’t utilise the skills they have.