Prioritize before you collapse

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do — Steve Jobs

When you enunciate the word ‘prioritize’, are you actually able to? Ask yourself, or do you keep on procrastinate your so-called to-do list. It happens with everyone, even after creating the list and prioritize them, we don’t follow that ethically.

Apart from Professional life, in COVID times when we all were suffering in managing an office with home, we tried to prioritize multiple tasks but took them in a very vague manner because the main problem here is we don’t understand what prioritization is and how badly it is required to balance every single element.

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Before we dive deep into the solution let’s try to understand the crux behind prioritization. There are two factors behind prioritization and people are always confused between one or the other. These are:

1. Urgent, and
2. Important

Do both of them sound the same? You must be able to relate now. What you will consider the first, urgent, important, or both, or none.

So, moving on I will be discussing further, taking product development into the context. A few days back I was working on a problem to prioritize multiple features, I read multiple models defined by experts by none of them hit me hard. After roaming around for few hours, having 3 cups of tea/coffee, I came up with something on my own. I call it a matrix of prioritization.

Let's understand in-dept what exactly this is, and how it will help us in prioritizing the tasks

1. Urgent-Important: The tasks which are identified as must deliver features to improvise the product, and are required by customers as well fall in this category.
2. Urgent-Not Important: We all know customers are the top stakeholders and should be given preference over everything. We place bugs that are creating issues for customers in this category, which might not seem as important but are degrading customer experience.
3. Important-Not Urgent: The features which are planned to be delivered in long term and require a lot of product and customer research fall in this category.
4. Not Important-Not Urgent: These are features that are placed in backlog, and are not compromising the product as well as customers.

Now one question that you must be thinking about what are the factors that should be taken into the account before placing the features in one of the four slots. I keep these points in mind and it helps, but the choice is yours.

1. No Customer study is required and the data says everything.
2. No Feasibility Check is required.
3. New features can fit well within the existing product.
4. What can be adapted fast by Customers

The above points are not just specific to the product/customers. They fit in everywhere. The people around you are your stakeholders/customers. The activities that you planning to do in a day are your features and now I feel you be able to decide how you should plan and prioritize your tasks be it in your personal life or professional life.

Thank You…..