Prioritisation with the business (outside of Productboard first)

  • 29 July 2022
  • 7 replies
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harry.mclaren
Userlevel 1
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We use Productboard both to prioritise discovery activity and then prioritise development work. 

Both steps involve asking “the business” (marketing, sales, customer success, service delivery, etc.) what’s important to them. However, at discovery prioritisation, doing it “live” in Productboard doesn’t work for us, as there’s not enough time. 

We need a way to circulate those up for prioritisation ahead of time, allowing the business to rank order / give a priority score to each. Then come together to compare and set a final priority within Productboard. 

We’re currently exporting a CSV, filtering, and then letting each business unit do their pre-work ahead of our call for setting final priority. This is not a great solution and is super manual. 

How do other people do it? 

I’m close to asking for some dev time to look at API and see if I can do something with a script and some Google Sheets and Python! 

Cheers! 

7 replies

JeremyAlexander
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Userlevel 3
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Hi Harry, 

Check out some code we wrote that exports your features to Google sheets: https://github.com/productboardlabs/pb-google-sheets-import

It gives a rough overview on how to use our features and custom fields API. You should be able to use this as a starting point to do the reverse, allow your commercial teams to add data and import to Productboard. 

plainclothes
Userlevel 4
Badge +1

AirFocus has a “priority poker” feature. Sounds like that’s what you’re after. Constantly dumping stuff out of Productboard sounds miserable.

That said, IMHO, the value of prioritization scores is the discussion. The team should spend less time divining a score in their head and more time talking about the implication of each opportunity on the scoring factors. The scores themselves are really just an artifact of the discussion.

harry.mclaren
Userlevel 1
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Hi Harry, 

Check out some code we wrote that exports your features to Google sheets: https://github.com/productboardlabs/pb-google-sheets-import

It gives a rough overview on how to use our features and custom fields API. You should be able to use this as a starting point to do the reverse, allow your commercial teams to add data and import to Productboard. 

Thanks I’m going to check that out!

harry.mclaren
Userlevel 1
Badge

AirFocus has a “priority poker” feature. Sounds like that’s what you’re after. Constantly dumping stuff out of Productboard sounds miserable.

That said, IMHO, the value of prioritization scores is the discussion. The team should spend less time divining a score in their head and more time talking about the implication of each opportunity on the scoring factors. The scores themselves are really just an artifact of the discussion.

Exactly like that! The way we want to do it stages of prioritisation. So each business unit does their own prioritisation, then the leaders of each one attend a workshop with PM to discuss competing priorities, etc. Then we agree a final priority order. For example right now we have 60 ideas to decide which go through to discovery… It’s not efficient to have all the leaders on a call and go through them one at a time. 

plainclothes
Userlevel 4
Badge +1

@harry.mclaren that sounds rough.

I wonder if a tighter corp strategy with time-boxed goals would help you shorten that list? IMHO, with no context, 60 items for multiple teams to consider with a regrouping of the leaders to debate sounds like a “feature factory” scenario.

harry.mclaren
Userlevel 1
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@harry.mclaren that sounds rough.

I wonder if a tighter corp strategy with time-boxed goals would help you shorten that list? IMHO, with no context, 60 items for multiple teams to consider with a regrouping of the leaders to debate sounds like a “feature factory” scenario.

I’d say it’s a product of having no PMs for almost a year, so I’ve come into quite a collection of ideas, priorities, etc. But we’re moving forward, so I’m not too concerned. Once we’re through this backlog, I suspect it’ll be a MUCH shorter list. Just a shame it’s hard to do in Productboard. 

david.morgan
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Userlevel 6
Badge +11

@harry.mclaren that sounds rough.

I wonder if a tighter corp strategy with time-boxed goals would help you shorten that list? IMHO, with no context, 60 items for multiple teams to consider with a regrouping of the leaders to debate sounds like a “feature factory” scenario.

I’d say it’s a product of having no PMs for almost a year, so I’ve come into quite a collection of ideas, priorities, etc. But we’re moving forward, so I’m not too concerned. Once we’re through this backlog, I suspect it’ll be a MUCH shorter list. Just a shame it’s hard to do in Productboard. 

I’ve jumped into an organization like this and it does take a little bit of time to find the right cadence between existing ideas, priorities, strategy, and so forth. The good news is that the org had the right mind to use Productboard (even if it has become cluttered and somewhat disorganized). One of the first things I did after acquiring some product knowledge (of the actual product), was go through the 600+ suggestions/ideas/etc and start breaking them down by age. 

Low priority items are much easier to identify if they’ve been sitting on a shelf for too long. Has the market moved on from it? Have competitors used a similar function/feature based on the request with positive results? So on and so on. It’s a chore, but it does give you some intrinsic insights into how the thinking of Customer Success, Customer Support, and Stakeholders were “before the me time.” 😁

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