Product Managers: 3 Key Concepts to Keep in Mind While Prioritising Your Feature Backlog

Regardless of whether you're a junior, mid-level, or senior executive Product Manager, prioritising your feature backlog will play a significant role in how you perform. Prioritising features will give you clarity on how your product will look as time passes, as well as ensures that what you produce will be of the highest quality it can be. Fortunately or unfortunately however, prioritisation can be done in a multitude of ways, and there isn't a "one size fits all" solution. It's great practice to evaluate a number of techniques, and choose what works for you, your company, and your product.

Tomer London, the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gusto gives us a framework to do just that in his article Comparing Apples and Oranges: A New Prioritization Framework for Product Managers. The cloud-based payroll and HR company knows what it takes to get a high-quality product out the door, and place a large amount of importance in how they prioritize. London talks about how it's often easy to compare features that are similar in nature to one another -- apples to apples -- but more notably, gives us a framework to compare features greatly differing in characteristics -- what he calls apples to oranges. Using frameworks like the impact matrix, he shows us how we can make better informed decisions for our users.

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Jeff Betts, former Product Manager at Google, also endorses using frameworks in feature prioritisation, and places a large amount of importance on measuring impact. He talks about giving users the chance to voice how much of an impact a feature would make, and mentions how building that - as well as potential costs -- in as factors in the framework you use is key. Betts also talks about OKRs -- objectives and key results -- and stresses the point that as Product Managers, it's important to define what success means early on, and measure your product against it as your project gathers steam. The factors you include in your framework will play a defining role in what your product will look like.

Based on these articles, it's clear that there are a few actions you should adopt:

1. Use the matrix: Gusto’s customer impact vs. expectations matrix is a great tool to judge your next feature against, as is Jeff Bett's cost vs impact framework. Think about what structures help you in evaluating your feature or product -- it could be the difference between a successful offering and a confused one.

2. Think numbers: Numbers give you an objective measure of success. Wherever possible, quantifying measures important to your product will give you a greater sense of clarity.

3. Visualize success: Think of what your successful product looks like, and make sure your team does as well. One key responsibility of a Product Manager is to maintain the vision of a product, and motivate his team members to uphold it.

The next time you're confused about what features to throw into your product mix, think frameworks and metrics, as well as what your ideal product looks like.

Author: Tav Agarwal is a senior at Northwestern University studying Economics, Computer Science, and Marketing. Tav is passionate about how technology can have a positive impact on society, and spends his time looking up cool new products. Follow Tav on Twitter, or connect with him on Linkedin to learn more!