Roadmap Prioritization

"Great PMs ruthlessly prioritize, both the team’s work and their own. They know that there are always more ideas than time, and that the greatest gift they can give their team is focus."

"Tactically, my rule of thumb is to spend 80% of my team’s time on short-term low-risk incremental wins, and 20% on high-risk, long-term bets. This way, we can continue to move our KPIs while bringing our big bet alongside."

"AI tools will give you a strong first draft (taking in your strategy, user research, and goals) and help you prioritize ideas, but you’ll still spend time with your team brainstorming, reviewing data and user research, discussing tradeoffs, and refining your roadmap."

"Initially, a straw-man plan is built (bottom-up), with the “big rocks” that are planned for the year. It is presented to the leadership team for high-level feedback. Then a more detailed plan is put together. That plan includes more specific feature descriptions and more concrete timelines."

"In the broader product organization, we’ve codified eight product principles, which have become especially essential at Miro’s scale and pace of growth. We use the principles to make choices in what we prioritize, what design options we choose, etc., which ensures that our decisions are calibrated and that the product remains in line with the team’s core DNA."

"In your OSR, every discrete project is sequenced according to its priority, its resourcing, and its outcomes. It is complementary to your OKRs, which might be at a higher level and less numerous. With an OSR, it is clear when a specific project is “above” or “below” the resourcing cutline."

"To determine what to create next, you need to consider the potential impact. The best way to do that is to make sure the work ladders up to a higher-level goal or OKR and to have a clear sense of what you are trying to achieve."

"The fewer things you focus on, the better those remaining things will go. I’ve seen this work miracles time, and time again."

"In short, RICE-ing is the process of T-shirt scoring (i.e. S/M/L) your ideas according to their: Reach: How many of your customers would experience the new idea; Impact: If the idea pans out, how much it would affect conversion; Confidence: How likely it is to work; Effort: How much time it would take to validate (from the engineering team)."

"During DRICE, we will go from: A 30-second estimate to a 30-minute estimate; A relative scoring (S/M/L) to a $X of expected annualized revenue; 'Wouldn’t it be cool if' to 'We are shovel-ready'."

"This is the place for a growth engineer to kick the tires of the assumptions behind the original T-shirt-size estimate. Projects could end up being much simpler (like the PayPal example) or much harder (due to complexity that wasn’t apparent until digging in)."

"Through a DRICE estimate, we reduced the engineering estimate and increased the success likelihood for our 'Checkout with PayPal' idea. With 30 minutes from PM and engineering, we’ve taken the idea from being marginal to a 'let’s definitely do it this quarter' type of idea."

"The frameworks are primarily intended for growth teams, but the practices apply to any team focused on moving a business metric. This prioritization process should be run every planning cycle."

"It’s a simple tool to help you prioritize tasks, using a 2x2 grid. It has you map all of your options into quadrants based on how urgent and important the task is and, through this simple process, helps you identify what’s truly important (not just urgent)."

"Note, it's totally fine for individual functions (e.g. the research team) to keep their own internal roadmap to keep track of their internal sub-tasks (e.g. schedule a focus group), but it's vital that your cross-functional teams always come back to a single source-of-truth roadmap with each team members’s projects and timelines."

"In that sense, a roadmap is like the musical score. It tells everyone on the team who’s responsible what, when they need to start and finish, and how all of the parts come together to create something great."

"In most situations, ignore most of these frameworks and just keep it simple. 1. Make a single list of all your team’s ideas 2. T-shirt-size (XS, S, M, L, XL) each idea on two dimensions: estimated impact and estimated cost 3. Sort the list based on the highest ratio of impact-to-cost"

"I like to follow the 80/20 rule: Roughly 80% of resources go to incremental low-risk projects, and 20% go to longer-term higher-risk bets. Take on too many long-term big bets, and leaders will wonder why you aren’t moving your metrics (and will often pull your resources)."

"Broadly, your single goal as an early-stage pre-PMF startup should be to make 10 customers very happy. Everything you prioritize should be in service of this goal."

"I’ve seen a lot of founders (particularly ex-PMs) with incredibly detailed strategy docs and really nice decks who don’t ship often enough, and thus end up building something no one really needed. If you’re holding back because you aren’t sure which direction to go, just ship something."

"The goal is to avoid disrupting existing impactful work, even if the idea is a good one, by reminding your manager why you committed to it in the first place."

"If it’s not dev work but an idea, feature request, etc. instead, it should live somewhere other than your backlog. Plus, schedule intentional time to groom your backlog."

"Similarly, about 50% of companies highlighted planning and goal setting as a core PM job. You could argue this is a subset of execution, but the fact that most companies broke this out into its own job tells you how important it is."

"In 2012, for example, we devoted hundreds of people across the company working on pages that collectively sold 700 items per day. We had three or four people working on search, which sold 100,000 items per day in that period."

"“The first version of your product is usually simple. As you keep building, the product becomes more robust in quality, utility, and experience. But there’s a tipping point after which ‘robust’ can sneakily switch to ‘complicated.’""

"Large brainstorms—bad source for big new ideas, but has other benefits such as getting everyone on the team involved in the process 🎯"