MeshThink

“We have to find a way to fit this project in this quarter. It’s the most important one on the board.”

“Where is that coming from? We’ve been hearing from our customers that we need to invest in these 3 key features — we’ve got those at the top of the board.”

“Look, I’m not saying those aren’t important. But my gut says that we need to work on this one.”

You may have been in this meeting — one where a set of projects or features is up on a board in priority order, and there’s a round-robin on which is the most important, without any real progress. Everyone has good reasons for why their favorite project is the *most* important, and they typically have a good argument to back it up. But getting folks to agree is tough — and sometimes comes down to a CEO or GM simply making the call. 

When these discussions are most contentious, it’s usually because people are discussing prioritizing features when they have different assumptions about the priority of business objectives. For example, someone in sales is likely to think that projects which close deals are the most important, and projects which reduce costs are fairly unimportant. The person who has responsibility for the IT budget may feel differently! 

A core duty of the product team is to ensure we’re not just building new capabilities the right way, but that we’re building them at the right time, for the right reasons. It’s difficult to do this when all stakeholders have different assumptions about what the most important business objectives are. If you find yourself debating project or feature priority and you haven’t had a discussion about the business objectives yet, it is time to hit the brakes.

I won’t discuss how to implement an OKR process here, but I’d like to point out a quick test to diagnose if you’re using them properly. Are your top-level objectives to build features, or are they to achieve business outcomes? A feature objective looks like this:

Obj: Deliver abandoned cart notification by end of Q2.

A business objective looks like this:

Obj: Improve new customer acquisition with enterprise retailer customers.

If you haven’t yet aligned the organization on the priority of business objectives, discussions to prioritize features will not be focused. 

Here’s a starting list of common objectives across many technical products:

Common Business Objectives

• Create or Grow the Market – get new customers who don’t use a competing product today
• Get Customers to Switch – get new customers by getting them to switch from a competing product. (in some cases this can be a either/or decision, but in other cases may mean using your product more often than competitor products.)
  • Get Customers to Switch From …  – In some cases, you’ll want to be more focused and choose a specific target competitor.
• Increase Engagement – get existing customers to use your product more.
  • Increase Frequency – get existing customers to use your product more often.
  • Increase Duration – get existing customers to use your product for a longer period of time.
• Expand to new … – expanding the part of the addressable market you are currently targeting. A few typical ways you may have initially limited your target market are:
  • Geography – Expanding to other countries or regions.
  • Persona – Expanding to target a new type of customer.
  • Vertical – Expanding to target businesses in new industries.
  • Customer Size – Expanding to target larger/smaller customers  
• Upsell – Get more use of premium features that drive higher revenue.
• Reduce Attrition – keep the customer base sticky and reduce the incidence of customers leaving the platform.
  • Reduce Attrition to … – In some cases, you’ll want to specifically prioritize customers who move to a specific competitor
• Improve Margins – Increase earnings by targeting cost reductions rather than revenue improvements
• Improve Efficiency – Where growth is bottlenecked by human factors — business support which is done manually — improve the speed or throughput of human operators.
• Increase Media Coverage – In some cases, building with a target of creating ‘buzz’ can be an important goal

Common Technical Objectives

• Increase scalability – Ensure components do not fail to deliver when some part of the business grows past a breaking point.
• Increase stability – Reduce the occurrence rate of critical production bugs
• Increase development speed – Invest some time now to ensure future roadmap items can be completed and deployed more quickly.

Of course, as a business, you want to do all of the above! Improvements against any of these objectives are inarguably beneficial, and a good product team can probably take this list and brainstorm 10 really good ideas for every one of these objectives. However, trying to drive all of these areas at once leads to lack of focus, and the danger of deploying a lot of individually valuable features without translating into much progress for the business. Try to drive alignment to 3-5 business objectives across all teams, and then communicate these focus areas loudly to everyone in the organization: Engineering, Sales, and everyone in between!