Prioritisation for

Product Managers JO WICKREMASINGHE

HEAD OF PRODUCT, WHICH? DIGITAL

PRODUCT TANK 15 APR 2015

INTRO

Prioritisation throughout

the organisation

Division

Portfolio

Product Product

Portfolio

Product Product

Division

Portfolio

Product Product

Portfolio

Product Product

STRATEGIC

PLANNING

PRIORITIES &

BUDGETS

ACROSS

PORTFOLIO

PRODUCT

ROADMAPS

Prioritisation throughout

the organisation

Journalism Radio & Music

Vision Future Media

Online Technology

Group

Players & On-

Demand News & Knowledge

News Homepage

& Search Weather &

Travel Sport

Knowledge & Learning

STRATEGIC

PLANNING

PRIORITIES &

BUDGETS

ACROSS

PORTFOLIO

PRODUCT

ROADMAPS

For small / new organisations

strategy = growth

Established organisations

balance existing products with new development

Product life cycle

All products will eventually start to decline

More competitors enter the market

New tech brings new capabilities

Disruption changes user behaviour

In digital the rate of innovation means what works today won’t work forever

Implications of strategic plans for

product managers

You have clear goals

and objectives to work towards

Leverage these goals to

help you prioritise your

product roadmaps

Challenges

• Which? is much smaller organisation than the BBC or Microsoft yet it still has a relatively large number of products and services under development

• The challenge my team faces at Which? is that its digital ambitions are ahead of where we are as an organisation

• Our whole digital team is 63 people including product and UXD, and we are supporting around 14 products in active development

• To put this into perspective at the BBC my Weather and Travel News team managed 3 products with a total team of 28 people, and this didn’t include the development teams which built some of the components we used like the global nav or BBC identity

So…. this makes it a very challenging environment for our product managers to prioritise

Product roadmap

prioritisation

Must have

o

Should have

Could have

o

Won’t have

High, Medium, Low

Editorial Development Marketing Sales Total

Feature 1 H M L L 15

Feature 2 H H L L 25

Feature 3 L M H M 45

Feature 4 M L M H 45

Assume H = 5, M = 3, L = 1

Different stakeholders usually have a different opinion about what is a high priority

Approach is too internally focused

Can use a multiplier to come out with aggregate weighting

but are all stakeholders equal?

Value mapping

EFFORT

RETE

NTI

ON

1 2

3 4

Story mapping

Minimum viable product

Use a combination of value mapping and story mapping to determine

What are the most valuable features

And what set of features need to be delivered together to create the minimum viable product

“ ”

The customer rarely buys

what the company thinks

it is selling them

PETER DRUCKER

Be prepared to pivot

Prioritisation for

Product Managers

Jo Wickremasinghe

Head of Product Which? Digital

uk.linkedin.com/in/jowickremasinghe

@WickyMast