How we prioritize Ducalis features inside Ducalis.

Values (Impact drivers):‍

• ‍Activation: Improves conversion rate for new users to understand the product.‍
• Delight: How will the product delight customers? How many users want it? Make it more convenient. ‍
• Retention: How significant are the reasons to return to the product?‍
• Acquisition: Helps us get new visitors per month. Virality, SEO, Word of Mouth ‍
• Reach: How many users (not companies) will use that feature:‍
• Upgrades: Will provide more new ARR  (new trials, plan upgrades, or expansion sales).

Efforts (cost of development):

• Front Time: Time for front-end development
• Back Time: Time for back-end development
• UX: Difficulty of describing and designing UX/UI

Organization of the backlog items to set their development sequence.

Collaborative workshop principles:

1. Start prioritization with Users/Business insights to refine the OKRs.
2. Introduce and evaluate each criterion separately to avoid abstract discussions.
3. Agree on follow-up activities to keep prioritization an ongoing iterative process.

Accelerate prioritization with a well-established process.

Principles:

1. Proper task description—state problem/result/comments.
2. Clear criteria—customize framework criteria to be unequivocal to the team.
3. Automation—use spreadsheets/tools to reduce manual work.
4. Collaboration—involve the whole team in the evaluation to collect diverse opinions.
5. Regularity—evaluate weekly, re-evaluate monthly.

The simplest and popular method to decide which issues should be tackled first to make the software better and safer for users.

• Relevance — Helps to understand if the bug still exist and remove it from a backlog.
• Frequency — Shows how often users can face with it and broken their workflow.
• Severity — Means how badly the bug has affected the application’s functionality.
• Front Time — Time estimates for Front-End development.
• Back Time — Time estimates for Back-End development.

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Scores discard and reiterated assessment over time.

Steps:

1. Set the score expiration period—depends on sprints and user context update.
2. Set the re-evaluation deadline—must be ready before sprint planning.
3. Set the team reminders—must be done regularly by the whole team.

Benefits:

1. Shared understanding.
2. Priorities actualization.
3. Meeting time reduction.

Visual exercise for prioritizing requirements in terms of customer value.

User story format: As a [type of user], I want to [action] so that [benefit].

Steps:

1. Frame the problem—Define the customer problem.
2. Define the user—Define your target audience.
3. Map user activities—Outline the activities every user does.
4. Map user stories—Break down each activity into user stories.
5. Prioritize—Rank stories by importance top to bottom.
6. Flow—Map the users flow through the product.
7. Identify risks—Envision the potential user issues.
8. Plan sprints/releases—Group stories by priority within each activity.
9. Schedule the prioritized user stories into sprints/releases.

2x2 matrix for prioritizing initiatives.

Risk options:

• Schedule risk—Can’t be realized in time.
• Cost risk—May cost more than allowed.
• Functionality risk—Not able to implement.

Make two separate assessments of each initiative:

• How much value will the initiative deliver?
  Scored: High Value / Low Value
• How risky is the implementation?
  Scored: High Risk / Low Risk

Results:

• High Value + Low Risk → Do First.
• High Value + High Risk → Do Second.
• Low Value + Low Risk → Do Last.
• Low Value + High Risk → Avoid.

Numerical scoring for prioritizing initiatives by multiple data layers.

Steps:

1. List the initiatives under consideration.
2. Devise a set of cost-vs-benefit criteria to score each initiative.
3. Determine the weights of each criterion by their importance.
4. Assign individual scores for each initiative by each criterion.
5. Multiply each score by the criterion weight.
6. Add up the results for each initiative.
7. Rank initiatives by their total score.