Prioritise problems, sequence solutions
It’s easy to get confused about prioritisation. We often use that word when we mean other things. We should mean ordering things by relative importance, but sometimes we also mean the sequencing of those things. One word, used to mean different things to different people. And that’s where it causes confusion.
I think it’s clearer to separate how important something is from when you’re going to do it. And to make that separation even cleaner, we could prioritise the problems we want to tackle, and sequence the solutions we want to create.
Prioritising problems
Like all good product managers, we want to start by understanding the problems we want to tackle or opportunities we want to go after.
We want to know which are the most important problems, and to figure that out we might look at how many people have the problem, how affected they are, how much they need a new solution, etc. All this information helps us pick which problems to tackle and which not to. And that’s the point of prioritisation; choosing what to work on, not when to work on it. It’s the logic of ‘this, not that’, whereas sequencing is ‘this, then that’.
Sequencing solutions
Once we have the problems prioritised by importance, we can then sequence the solutions.
We want to sequence the solutions separately from prioritising the problems because there are different factors to consider. Now we need to think about team capacity, technical skills, dependencies on other systems, budgets and other organisational constraints, etc. These things don’t affect what problems we’ve prioritised but they make a difference to when we’ll be able to tackle them.
By thinking about problems and solutions differently we can avoid confusing how important a problem is from when we want to solve it. It helps us make better decisions about whether to tackle more important problems sooner or when to solve easier problems.