Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working on cleaning up our product backlog, and the one thing that I always find to be the most challenging is the prioritization. I’ve worked on a number of different products over the years, with a number of different teams, and have used a number of different methods to prioritize a backlog, and I thought I would take a few minutes to share them with you now.

1)    Feature rating – This is the method where Excel really shines, because you get to create a cool matrix consisting of your features and a number of categories that are important (such as revenue generation, importance to existing customers, competitive differentiation, and so on). You then put a rating (usually 1-5, with 5 being the most important) in each of these categories for each feature…add them up, and the feature with the highest total becomes “most important feature #1”. Now, you can make this even more interesting by giving a weight to each category, to show which categories are the most important. So, for example if revenue generation is the most important factor in your company, then give that category a .5. Give your remaining categories a weighting, ensuring that the total weighting equals 1. This method can give very clear results, but can tend to be biased (I really like this feature, so I will give it a higher rating than this feature I don’t really like…)

2)    Baseline prioritization – In this method you pick a feature that you feel should be in a release, then compare all other features to this one. If any of the features are more important than that initial feature, then they become a higher priority, and conversely, those that are less important become a lower priority. I have found this method okay, but difficult to get a really good prioritized list…yes you get a list of the most important features, but not really fully prioritized list saying feature 1 is the most important, followed by feature 2, etc.

3)    Gut feel – This method is certainly the least scientific of the bunch, but it still relies on instinct, and can work well if you have a really good grasp of the market and your customer base. In the times I’ve done this, I’ve also tried to take the concepts of method 1 above, and apply that… so for example, Feature A has 6 different customers crying for this, will definitely generate more revenue, and further differentiates our product from our competition…sounds like our top feature for this release! This is the method that I find the most effective because you get to apply a number of concepts from a number of different methods.

There are a number of other methods out there that I haven’t used, so I would be interested to hear what experiences you have had with them, or with the ones I’ve listed above.

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About the Author: Todd Landry

Todd Landry, a Senior Product Manager at Klocwork, is responsible for guiding product direction and ensuring its fit with customer's preferred development processes. With more than 13 years of experience in software product management, he has worked with numerous Agile teams and projects. Todd is a Professional Engineer and a Certified Scrum Product Owner. In his spare time, Todd enjoys golfing, playing hockey, and snowboarding.