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Solving the Prioritization Nightmare

The prioritization problem isn't about features—it's about collisions, choices, compromises, and conflicts. This is our story of fighting prioritization chaos and building a framework that works. If it resonates, consider trying our approach.

The Problem with Prioritization and Team Alignment​

CEOs demand one feature, competitors ship another, your biggest customers request something else, advisors push different priorities, and your product team has their own vision. Before saying "Yes" to any request, ask: Does this fit the vision? Is it a forward step? Will it matter in 5 years?

Des Traynor from Intercom on prioritization

Hiten Shah honestly said that prioritization problems ruined KissMetrics. He would drop "Hiten bombs" on the team—new ideas, new directions, brilliant things he came up with. "Good or bad, none of my ideas were based on any kind of framework or filter. I was shooting from the hip. Thinking that I was helping us focus and execute. I was dead wrong." The team was scattered and they lost it all.

"My Billion Dollar Mistake" by Hiten Shah from KissMetrics

Steli Efti from Close.io recently wrote a post about the importance of over-communication in remote teams. You have to make sure your team stays in touch with each other, way beyond what's necessary to get the job done. Everybody should get not only Who is doing What, but also Why.

Linkedin post by Steli Efti from Close.io

Carrying out useless tasks is the greatest company time theft.

How RICE Failed: Building an Internal Prioritization Framework​

We faced the same problems. It's challenging to keep everybody on the same page in a remote team, sometimes working from different time zones. Customers demanded features, managers offered ideas, developers had their own product vision. The list of Issues was growing rapidly. Unimportant tasks were randomly pulled from the backlog and transferred to development unannounced. Product managers kept asking "Why are we even doing this? The priorities have changed!"

We tried to discuss all our Jira Cloud Issues every week. We tracked important things on Google Keep. We added fancy Jira Cloud plugins. None of this was helping. It was a mess.

The reason: we didn't have common objective criteria for assessing the importance of Issues. Every one of us was pursuing their own interests, and remote working was turning it all into complete chaos. That's when we decided to try existing prioritization frameworks.

Why RICE Didn't Work​

We started with the RICE Score—a four-factor prioritization framework for evaluating product ideas: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

RICE prioritization model

But it didn't work for us. The teams were confused about Impact. Everybody had their own picture of what is impactful. Should we value an Issue for money or reliability impact?

Developers valued code refactoring as crucial for the product. But fixing the help center article layout seemed like a waste of time. And vice versa for the managers.

The biggest problem with RICE—it doesn't help each team member keep in mind what exactly is impactful right now.

Fixing RICE: Synchronizing Teams on Impact​

Improving prioritization isn't about a tool or a framework. It's about fixing broken collaboration. We discussed what is important and came up with a list of requirements for evaluation criteria. They must:

  • Be clear and unequivocal
  • Reflect relevant company objectives
  • Consider business, product, marketing, and development goals
  • Consider developers' and managers' points of view

At the end of the day we ended up with a mix of:

North Star Metric + RICE + AARRR + Business Pain Point:

  • Sales. Influences the money income (Acquisition from AARRR)
  • Activation. Helps users understand how the product works (Activation from AARRR)
  • Retention. Increases user motivation to use the product again (Retention from AARRR)
  • Service. Helps us spend less time on customer support without quality loss (Our Business Pain Point)
  • FB Ads. Increases the amount of Facebook Ads a user launches via our product. Important for Facebook Marketing Partnership (Product North Star Metric)
  • Time. Time spent on development, complexity (Effort from RICE)
  • Mass. How many customers, product units, or how much money this feature will affect (Reach from RICE)

To simplify the evaluation process we borrowed a weighted scoring model: different relative weights are assigned to different criteria. For example, time spent on development should have a multiplier of -3 because we prefer to find quick wins.

You assign a score from 0 to 3 to each criterion:

  • 3 — must be
  • 2 — should be
  • 1 — could be
  • 0 — won't be

Jira Cloud + Google Sheets: Marriage and Divorce​

Then, we had to put it all together. Like many others, we started with Google Sheets. Automate.io helped pull data from Jira Cloud. 5 sheets as databases for calculations. The results were great for the first few weeks.

The first version of our weighted prioritization framework built with Google Sheets, Jira Cloud, and Automate.io

But in two months our shiny new prioritization system became a giant and slow file with lots of problems:

  • Issue import was constantly crashing
  • Lots of duplicated data rows
  • Inflexible calculation
  • Dozens of browser tabs to read Issue context
  • The team often forgot to evaluate new Issues

One of our teammates became a spreadsheet admin. His mission was to constantly fix the spreadsheet.

At the end of the day, the team was annoyed with a dull routine nobody wanted to waste time on.

Building Our Own Tool for Fast Prioritization​

Finally, we decided to stop beating the dead horse and build our own tool.

We tried to make the interface as fast and as simple as possible. Ducalis resembles the usual spreadsheets, only formulas don't fall apart. And you don't need to switch between browser tabs—you assign scores, read the Issue context, and see Criteria descriptions on a single screen.

Issues sync in real-time. Criteria descriptions appear in pop-ups—no need to remember them or switch to a separate document. The calculation formula won't crash if you change something, and scores won't disappear. The whole team can assign scores simultaneously. Ducalis doesn't freeze and the UI works super fast. You can evaluate dozens of Issues in a few minutes without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Blazing fast UI with hotkeys and focus mode

Blazing fast UI, Hotkeys, Focus Mode, etc.

Bird's-Eye View of Team Priorities​

After the Evaluation, scores are calculated and Issues ranked in the Backlog automatically. You can quickly see the overall picture of the most important project tasks. All necessary details like Issue status, sprint, priority, and description are on one screen.

A bird's-eye view of team's top priorities

Every Project is Unique​

Then, we started using Ducalis Boards for evaluating different projects—two product development Boards and one marketing plan Board. A Board is a combination of the What (Issues and tasks), the Who (teammates), and the How (Criteria).

We realized that we can apply the same approach in many areas:

  • Feature requests
  • Bug-fixing
  • Marketing tasks
  • Content ideas
Three Ducalis boards—two for feature ideas and one for marketing tasks

We use three Ducalis Boards—two for feature ideas and one for marketing tasks

Overwhelmingly Positive Results​

  • The whole process takes only 15-20 minutes if you sort the tasks out weekly
  • You can see what's your team's priority and what's not
  • Backlog Issues are evaluated by the whole team, not by particular managers
  • Any number of users can evaluate simultaneously
  • Settings can always be configured: you can add/remove users and Criteria without data loss
  • No need to switch tabs: Issue context and Criteria descriptions are on a single screen
  • Real-time synchronization—if the Issue changes in the tracker, it changes in Ducalis
  • Slack and email notifications remind the team about Evaluation and create a strong habit
  • The whole team understands the company's objectives and priorities

Here you can read about Ducalis Workflow in more detail.

It does magic to the team when they look at the Backlog—not only do they see what is important, they also understand why. Yes, everyone perceives the tasks differently. But that's a cool bonus because you collect diverse opinions.

We've come a long and painful way. After a year of using Ducalis, we came to the conclusion that Google Sheets aren't suitable for collaborative prioritization. The only viable solution is to replace them with a dedicated tool.

First Users' Testimonials​

We launched on March 16, 2020. The number of applications turned out to be ten times greater than we could have imagined. Spreadsheet Prioritization was a common pain that could now be cured.

The feedback we received after the first tests​

The best tool for backlog grooming.

Cool thing! Especially, I like the scoring expiration.

As soon as I saw it, I knew—we need it.

I have approached this topic from different angles, and it seems like the best solution so far.

It took me and my other colleague about two and a half hours in total to evaluate 80 features. That's fast.

Ducalis is a ready-made workflow.

Helps the whole team to understand where we're heading.

Last updated: Yesterday