How to decide what's up next?

Prioritisation is the processes for deciding what's up next or the what's most important thing to work on right now. A prioritised list creates a shared understanding to help direct a teams movement in the same direction. Benefits of a clear priority list include trackable progress, transparent decision-making process, and achievable goals.

For product feature development, you combine all of the decisions made throughout the entire process to set the direction and define the roadmap.

Independently you will prioritise:

Problem & discovery backlog (e.g. the research backlog)
Backlog tickets, specs, and user story (e.g. the developer backlog)
Epic level / work-stream prioritisation (e.g. the brief backlog)
Design backlog (e.g. what features need UI design work)

All of these smaller prioritisations lead to the bigger overarching prioritisation of the outcomes at a product level (e.g. the product roadmap)

<aside> ✨ Roadmap Priority = Insights + Data + Strategy

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Making a product roadmap is all about making a decision on priority and deciding what deserves the most attention. To make good prioritisation decisions you need to collect as much information as possible.

Your decisions are only as good as the combinations of the inputs. Collecting data, gathering advice, and bringing together as many inputs as possible will give more clarity to the decisions that are made. Prioritisation decisions are the most influential decisions to the product because the set the product strategy.

Building a roadmap

Roadmaps hold the high-level strategy of a product. Roadmaps are the highest level visual representation of strategy to be shared across all stakeholders. Roadmaps show priority.

<aside> 🙋 Who owns the work: Product Manager Who's involved: UX Designer, Business, Researcher, Tech Lead

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You can build one roadmap for everyone, or make separate ones for each stakeholder group.

Roadmaps are used to:

Articulate priority,