Learn how to prioritize your initiatives using the Prioritization Board.
Deciding which initiatives to include in your future product releases can be a difficult process. With the Prioritization Board the process is now easier, more productive, and more transparent.
Based on product management best practices, the Prioritization Board helps you and your team objectively score opportunities to decide what to include on the roadmap. Most importantly, the Prioritization Board can help guide your product strategy discussions and help you get buy-in from key stakeholders.
Each roadmap has a unique Prioritization Board. You prioritize opportunities based on a customized set of Benefit and Cost categories. ProductPlan then scores and ranks each opportunity based on the relative weighting of each category.
Using the Prioritization Board
You can open your Prioritization Board up from anywhere in your Roadmap by clicking the clipboard icon.
Start by deciding what benefits and costs you want to prioritize your items against. You can customize the columns and weights in your Prioritization Board by clicking the pencil icon next to the header row. (More information on the scoring calculation below)
You can add items and view your Prioritization Board from anywhere in the Roadmap. To score items from either the Planned or Parked section of your Table Layout, first select the items you'd like to add and then select "Prioritize" from the actions drop down (the actions drop down will only appear once an item is selected).
To add an item from the Roadmap view simply right click on the item and click "Prioritize". To add multiple items from the Roadmap, hold down your shift key to select the items you'd like to add, and click prioritize from the menu at the top of the screen. To add an entire Lane to prioritize, hold down your shift key and then select the Lane you'd like to prioritize.
Once items are added to the Prioritization Board and your costs and benefit columns have been customized, users can score each of the items from 1-5 in each of the different columns to see a total score on the right hand side (see more information on how the score is calculated below).
To see an item's score, simply open up your Prioritization Board or visualize scores from a Roadmap's Table View by selecting it to display from the settings drop down in the right hand corner.
How Scoring Works on the Prioritization Board
The Prioritization Board uses a scale of 1-5 to rank each opportunity in a category. One (1) is low Benefit or low Cost. Five (5) is high Benefit or high Cost.
The total score is a composite of Benefit versus Cost and takes into account each column’s weighting. An item with 5's on the Benefit side and 1’s on the Cost side will be awarded 100% of the total possible points. You can adjust the weighting of each column to the number of your choosing (this will change the total possible points).
In the screenshot below, the first item “Cloud Support” has a score of 72 out of a maximum of 120 calculated in the following way:
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In the Benefit section (green), the first column’s score is 1, so that gets 20% of the 20 possible points (4 points).
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The second column score is 4, so that gets 80% of the 20 possible points (16 points).
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The third column score is 2, so that gets 40% of the 20 possible points (8 points).
In the Cost section (yellow), remember that a low number affects the score positively (reverse of the Benefit calculation).
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In the first Cost column the score is 2, so that gets 80% of the 20 possible points (16).
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The second column score is 4, so that gets 40% of the 20 possible points (8 points).
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The third column score is 1, so that gets the maximum of the 20 possible points (20 points).
Adding up the points (4,16,8,16,8,20) you get a score of 72.
Whether an item exists on the Roadmap or on the Parked Section of your Roadmap, it will be denoted by the icon to its left. To move Parked items onto the Roadmap, you can move items from within the Table Layout.
Once you have a score for each item, you can have an objective discussion with the team about what to include on the product roadmap.
Note: Prioritization Board cannot be exported in its entirety. However, the final score can be reflected as a column within the Table View and exported via XLS file.