A priority matrix is a management tool for determining the development vector where priorities are visually divided into four (or more) quadrants.
There are matrices for personal time management and complex business projects. Most of them have derived from the Eisenhower matrix created to manage personal tasks.
A prioritized backlog visually divided into 2x2 matrix in Ducalis.io
When to use a priority matrix
Use an action priority matrix when you have limited resources and you want to distribute them rationally to maximize performance and ROI.
Placing backlog tasks into four quadrants will help you visualize their impact on the main business objectives. Focus the team efforts on one of the four quadrants to have a clear understanding of where you’re heading, what results, and when to expect.
How the quadrants work
One of the most efficient and easy to use is the 2x2 matrix. It consists of two evaluation criteria: one positive (e.g., Value, Impact, or Revenue) and one negative(e.g., Effort, Costs, or Risk).
Tasks evaluated by the criteria are divided into four quadrants:
Quadrant 1—high positive score and low negative score. This quadrant is often called Quick Wins, and its tasks are low-hanging fruit that will bring you positive results immediately. Most likely, you should do these tasks first.
Quadrant 2—high positive score and high negative score. Here are your Major Projects that won’t bring immediate results but are strategically valuable and should be considered on your roadmap.
Quadrant 3—low positive score and low negative score. These are so-called Fill-Ins—cheap solutions with no significant impact. These tasks should be further discussed and implemented only when you have extra resources.
Quadrant 4—low positive score and high negative score. These are Thankless Tasks. They bring little to no value and cost you a lot. Delete them or reconsider the solution to become more valuable.
How to create and use a priority matrix
1. Think of what is currently important to your business to come up with appropriate criteria.
Do you have deadlines, and time is critical? Or you must avoid risks at all costs?
Two criteria are enough for a fast and simple prioritization. Yet, they aren’t enough for complex projects where you must consider and juggle multiple stages of user behavior or business objectives. We in Ducalis.io estimate all the vital elements for our product and just filter the matrix by the criteria we need more focus on at some point in time.
We hide some criteria to consider tasks influencing only the objective important now.
2. Decide on the score range.
What numbers will your team use when estimating the criteria?
Each criterion should be evaluated by the same numbers with prescribed interpretation. We use numbers from 0 to 3 where 0—no impact, 1—low impact, 2—medium impact, 3—high impact.
We use criteria tooltips so that we don't have to keep in mind what they and the scores mean.
3. Estimate all the necessary tasks together with the team.
Who takes part in the project and can bring a unique perspective to the table? Does the project require only engineers or designers and copywriters’ efforts as well?
Considering each task by the whole team strengthens your shared understanding and gives the best prioritization results. In our team, managers evaluate feature Reach and Revenue, engineers and UX/UI—Development Time, and everybody must estimate Activation, Retention, and two product-specific criteria, Speed and Collaboration.
Most of the criteria we evaluate together to keep our shared understanding solid, and specific ones we leave to experts.
4. Study and discuss the prioritization results.
Why have these features made it to the top? Do you all agree they are most valuable now and must be implemented?
Never take the prioritization result into work unquestioningly. Prioritization is a tool to help you make the right decisions and not make them instead of you. Discuss your top priorities with the team at the planning meeting and make sure you all understand what must be done, why this way, and why it’s important.
To Sum Up
A priority matrix is simple and efficient. You can make it far more powerful by using automation tools. Ducalis.io allows you to create a complex prioritization framework you can use both as a weighted decision matrix and action priority matrix and switch the criteria focus in no time.
Try our matrix templates. Free to sign up and free to use. No credit cards. Just jump in and prioritize for your growth.
In this article, we quickly mention some of the popular frameworks, explain when to use them, and their pros and cons.
All the mentioned frameworks are available in Ducalis.io. You can hit a framework link in the article or choose a framework during our onboarding.
Early Stage
These frameworks are great for startups and products in the early stages of development. They are suitable for features, ideas, hypotheses, marketing activities, and jobs prioritization as a whole.
1) AARRR
Acquisition—How will this solution increase the number of people we attract to the website/app?
Activation—How will this solution increase the number of people who start using?
Retention—Will this solution increase the number of people who regularly use the product?
Referral—Will this solution increase the number of people eager to tell others about the product?
Revenue—Will this solution increase the number of people who pay for product usage?
No fixed scores and formula. We use 0 to 3 score range and calculate the sum of average team scores.
Here are some tips and tricks to improve and complete your own prioritization system.
1) Efforts and Costs
Most of the frameworks mentioned above have a drawback of not considering efforts and costs. This is easy and critical to fix. Prioritization makes little sense when it takes into account only values. Any job requires investments like time or money or both. Add criteria with negative weights to any framework missing them.
2) North Star Metric
The North Star Metric is the fundamental measure of success for the product team in a company. To find your North Star Metric, you must understand the core value you bring and try to convey it as a single metric. Famous examples of unique metrics are Airbnb "Nights booked" and Facebook "Daily Active Users."
If you know your company's North Star Metric, add it to your prioritization criteria. It will stimulate your teammates to think about how the next brilliant idea helps your company enhance its customers' core value a lot more. Lead the initiatives through a question:
Does this feature help us grow "the special metric"?
After a few cycles of evaluation, you'll see how much the ideas are misleading to your North Star Metric.
3) OKRs
To use your OKRs for prioritization, you can develop a set of questions that the issues should go through.
Let's assume that one of your team's objectives is to increase the number of link clicks by 60%. To achieve it, you will probably need to increase the amount of website traffic in general, so, when considering some new features, you might ask yourself a question: Will this help me to increase traffic? And your other objective is to lower the cost per conversion by 20%, and when considering marketing tools, you might ask yourself questions like: Is this tool/service expensive? Is this tool/service efficient?
For these reasons, you may come up with such criteria:
Traffic—Does this bring a lot of users to the website?
Cost—Does it cost a lot?
Conversion—Does it help to convert visitors into buyers?
Time—Will it take a lot of time to complete the task?
Try Ducalis for free:
Big prioritization framework library
Flexible criteria set up
Team alignment reports
Team reminders and notifications
Two-way sync with your task tracker
Task tracking
Collaborative evaluation
And much more for teams who care to build shared understanding for impactful results.
Technical Debt Prioritization
Minimizes future risks and avoids slowing down the development of your software.
Code Knowledge. How are you familiar with the code?
Severity. How it affects the software's functionality or performance?
Dependency and Scale. How many components depend on that part of the code? The scale of impacted software architecture.
Cost of Fixing. How many story points would it cost to fix the technical debt issue?
.jpg)
