(2022-12-14) Baschez How To Prioritize A Roadmap

Nathan Baschez: How to Prioritize a Roadmap. There are two ubiquitous pieces of advice on how to prioritize a product roadmap. Unfortunately, both are useless.

The first is to create a spreadsheet to list all your ideas, and score each one by how much it will cost to build and how much impact it will have.

1. Prioritization isn’t about prioritization

You don’t get good at prioritization by learning frameworks to help you sort a list of ideas. Instead, you master it by learning general and domain-specific business knowledge

2. Prioritization is where every skill related to company building converges into a single choke point.

in order to decide what should be done (and what shouldn’t), someone has to integrate all this knowledge.

3. Generalists beat specialists at prioritization

4. Prioritization decisions are hard to explain

there is no simple answer. These decisions depend on a multitude of factors and personal experiences.

5. Garbage in, garbage out; diamonds in, diamonds out

If you don’t have any good ideas in your list, it doesn’t matter how effectively you prioritize them. (This might seem obvious, but most people don’t spend enough time on ideation.) Conversely, if your list of ideas is full of bangers, prioritization doesn’t matter that much.

6. Starting from business goals is dangerous

there are two main sources of ideas:
Problems customers have (e.g., write faster)
Goals the business has (e.g., build a network effect)

It’s better to prioritize ideas that come from the first source

7. Big leaps aren’t always worth it

Perhaps you’d be better off polishing what you have. You’d be surprised how much you can move the metrics with seemingly small ideas. (compounding)

8. Beware the streetlight effect

you also know that those collaboration features won’t matter if the core value—the way AI is integrated into the writing experience—isn’t as solid as possible. So it makes sense to focus on these features, even if they have less of an obvious 1:1 correlation to growth than some others.

There are certain types of ideas that have an impact that is hard to measure. In low-trust teams (more on this in thesis number 10), these ideas never get done even when they’re obviously important because they’re too hard to justify compared to “streetlight ideas,” like revamping a viral invite flow.

9. Define an organizing principle

Startups obsess over weekly growth rates, and public companies obsess over margins—but these are goals, not strategies. The best companies choose narrative frames in addition to measurable goals that help them stay focused. (strategic context)

10. Prioritization is about trust and alignment

the shared understanding created within a team by going through a prioritization process together.

by having hard conversations as a group, we'll be prepared to handle those contingencies.

the only way to get a group to truly understand a strategy is to go beyond a high-level articulation and show what it means when hard decisions about resource allocation trade-offs are faced.