Archive of Prioritization Articles

The wisdom of crowds helps us avoid stupid decisions. Unfortunately, it also prevents innovative, passionate, fantastic decisions. Collective Intelligence is collective insipidness. We need to keep the inputs of individuals in the mix.

There are 15 ways for someone to shutdown a laptop running Windows Vista. This adds unwarranted complexity to our software. How can we avoid the same problem in our software?

Michael Shrivathsan just wrote an article presenting five tips for creating products with great design.
Michael’s List

Start with the user interface. [Roger Cauvin adds, start with a working first iteration]
Work closely with UI designers.
Pay attention to details.
Simpler is better.
Be brave.

Our Thoughts
User centric design is the core of UX and interaction design. It is the most [...]

Prioritization can be hard, especially when we’re dealing with a lot of variables. Peter Abilla, at shmula.com takes a fairly esoteric tool (interrelation digraphs) and applies it as a prioritization tool. Opthamologists have learned that they can’t show us a bunch of blurry images and have us tell them which one looks the best, and then prescribe a corrective lense. They have to ask us “Is it better like this? Or better like this?” Peter’s approach does the same thing, but with a quantitative edge.

A little Halloween fun - an homage to Edgar Allen Poe describing this week’s issue triage and prioritization meeting.

Kathy Sierra writes (another) great article at Creating Passionate Users. This time, she talks about why users don’t upgrade and presents ways to get users to install the latest version. We focus in this article on one way in particular - using goal-driven documentation to encourage upgrading.

Brainstorming can be a simultaneously fun and effective technique for identifying software features or requirements. We’ve written previously about how to facilitate a brainstorming session and how to leverage the results. Timothy Johnson shares another way to use the results effectively. His way is more fun, and maybe just as effective.

Stealing a couple cool ideas for managing project priorities with something you can touch.

The product manager role is strategic. Product managers identify valuable problems in the market and determine which of them should be solved with software. They create a vision and strategy for solving those problems. Everything else happens in that context.
James Shore has written a post on the importance of staffing the team [...]

Jason at 37signals has started a discussion about feature prioritization with his recent post. He describes the epicenter of software as the most important, must-have feature. He argues that this feature should always be the one that is built first, since without it you don’t have an application. This is the same approach we reccommended in our recent post about prioritizing requirements with Kano analysis. The epicenter, while critically important, isn’t sufficient to drive success for the software.