Prioritizing ideas for effective product development

Knowing how to prioritize effectively is one of a product manager’s most important skills. Effective prioritization is a superpower of successful product teams, enabling them to move fast and focus on the highest-impact activities.

But prioritization is rarely clear-cut or simple; product managers need to be intentional and make careful judgment calls. They’re balancing conflicting priorities and considerations like immediate business needs, long-term strategy, customer requests, competition, and changing market conditions.

On the flip side, when prioritization isn’t grounded in insights and connected to outcomes, it can become a nightmare. Discussions devolve into conflict, there’s no clear way to reach consensus, and choices are made based on gut feel or the loudest-voiced opinions.

Prioritization is both art and science

For the best outcomes, prioritization should combine structured methods with qualitative considerations, leaving room for intuitive decision-making.

Frameworks like RICE or the Impact vs. Effort Matrix can help structure the conversation. But you should also tap into your teams’ and stakeholders’ knowledge of business goals and customer needs; for example based on research, user interviews, and inbound feedback. Prioritization has an element of science, but will always need a bit of art.

Different organizations prioritize in different ways. The right approach depends on factors like company culture, team size, product maturity, and who drives decision-making (as in sales-led vs. product-led companies).

Like so much else in product development, prioritization must be continuously refined — what you prioritize, and how you prioritize it.

If you work on an early stage product, chances are you’re focused on immediate customer needs.
Once you find product market fit, you’ll start thinking about activation, user engagement and retention, addressing technical debt, and preparing the system for scale.
On mature products, you may prioritize distribution, and exploring new revenue streams like premium features, partnerships, and new product launches.
As your team and company grow, you may need to involve more people in the prioritization process, like sales, support and customer success teams.

You’ll never find the perfect method that will keep working forever. For all these reasons, we’ve designed Jira Product Discovery like a flexible canvas, to support the right conversations for what’s important to your company and product at your stage of growth. No two Jira Product Discovery projects are the same.

Ingredients for prioritization success

While every team will prioritize in a unique way, there are still a few key elements for effective prioritization. Unfortunately, many teams get bogged down in ineffective prioritization that holds them back from achieving their goals.
Here’s what to strive for — and steer away from — in your prioritization efforts.

Strive for	Steer away from
Prioritization that balances different types of investments over time, like user requests, sales opportunities, strategic bets, and metric movers	Prioritization over-focused on output, like shipping new features, over outcomes
Collaborative prioritization, including the whole product team as well as all stakeholders who have insights into business and customer needs	Prioritization dictated by leadership, or handled in isolation by the product manager
Continuous prioritization based on learnings	Prioritizing once a year in a “big bang” roadmapping effort
Leveraging data and insights, to prioritize based on qualitative and quantitative data from a continuous product discovery practice	Prioritizing based on gut feel or loud customer and stakeholder opinions

Prioritizing a balanced mix of product investments

On many product teams, we’ve seen a tendency to think of prioritization as “which features should we ship next?”

That’s a recipe for trouble. Even leaving aside external forces and market pressure, like competitor disruption, prioritizing this way won’t lead to the product outcomes you want.

You can move quickly just by adding new features — at first. But that’s the easy part of product management. The hard part is creating products that keep delighting users many years into the future.

Simply shipping everything your customers ask for isn’t enough to make your product a success. For example:

If you focus on feedback from active users, evaluators might not understand the value of your app because you haven't invested in onboarding
Feature bloat might make the product hard to use, so early adopters can't convince others to use it
Bugs and reliability issues might prevent users from performing key tasks, because you focused on shipping new features over maintaining the ones you have

One way to prevent this pitfall is to divide your product roadmap into buckets for different aspects of product success. You might have buckets for new features, improving existing ones, investing in reliability, and focusing on distribution.

Invest in each bucket proactively — not in response to the crises that will inevitably arise by ignoring them — and assign budget to each ahead of time.

RUF: Reliability, Usability, new Features

We recommend balancing investments between new product features, improving the current experience, and strengthening the product’s engineering foundations for reliability.

A framework that many teams at Atlassian use to balance investments is called RUF:

RUF = Reliability + Usability improvements + new Features

Think of the RUF framework as a pyramid:

Reliability Usability new Features prioritization framework

Reliability	The first thing users expect from your app is that whenever they open it, and it just works. When they try to perform key actions, there are no bugs preventing them from getting work done. The app doesn’t lose their data, or make it seem like it did due to poor UX. Users believe their data is safe and secure. Reliability is about building trust. Trust takes a long time to build, but can be destroyed very quickly — a single event of data loss or security breach can be a serious source of churn, let alone repeat incidents. Reliability is the base of the pyramid. Any issues here should be the priority — you must everything and focus on resolving them. Invest in the infrastructure that will let these urgent interruptions happen: incident management processes, system redundancy, technical debt reduction, and more.
Usability improvements	The longer you’ve worked on a product, the more features it likely has. Feature bloat is the silent killer of many apps. Typically, 20% of features account for 80% of the usage. Customers typically value apps that do one thing, but do it well, over Swiss-army knives that try to be all things to all people. A feature is rarely “done” forever — it’s part of a system and that system needs constant tuning. In your roadmap, it is important to allocate budget and resources to keep investing in your current feature set: - Improve the user experience of highly-used features - Make lesser-used features more discoverable - Remove the features that have no traction - Improve onboarding to improve utilization and conversions
New Features + Ideas	With a strong foundation in place, you can add new features. Everyone knows what we’re talking about here 😉

The 3 Bucket Planning Guide for prioritizing new ideas

Even when it comes to new product ideas, take a balanced approach to set your product up for success.

🛑 You can’t just build whatever features customers ask for, as you risk only helping your current user base.

🛑 You can’t only focus on improving key business metrics like revenue growth, as you might ignore important customer needs.

🛑 You can’t only ship new revolutionary ideas either, or you put reliability and usability at risk

Adam Nash, former VP product and growth at Dropbox, suggested looking at 3 buckets (source: “the 3 bucket planning guide”):

A view of 3 bucket feature planning in Jira Product Discovery

Metrics Movers are product initiatives that directly contribute to business goals by improving key metrics: sign-ups, conversion, retention, active users, referrals, revenue, etc. Growth initiatives typically fall in this category.
Customer Requests are what customers ask for, both net-new features and improvements to current experiences. Addressing these helps keep customers happy, reduce support load, and ensure that your product nails its key jobs.
Delighters are where your product innovates. These are the features your customers didn’t know they wanted, but can improve their lives by changing how they work. Delighters differentiate you from competition and build a moat around your product.

Allocating budget across investments

It’s important to be intentional in how you invest in each of these buckets. Otherwise, your velocity might drop because your team spends 80% of their time fixing bugs, or the growth of your product slows down, because you’re not thinking strategically. Shipping as many new features as possible is unlikely to fix that.

The right budget allocation for each bucket depends on many things, but in particular the stage of your product: pre-PMF (Product Market Fit), post-PMF, or mature product.

In practice, budget allocation could look like this:

	Pre-PMF	Post-PMF	Mature
Reliability	Pre-PMF 10%	Post-PMF 30%	Mature 50%
Usability improvements	Pre-PMF 20%	Post-PMF 20%	Mature 20%
Customer requests and delighters	Pre-PMF 70%	Post-PMF 30%	Mature 10%
Growth initiatives	Pre-PMF	Post-PMF 20%	Mature 20%

Remember, this should never be set in stone. For example, you might decide to invest more in new features for a few months, then go back and focus on UX improvements or addressing technical debt.

But as you allocate and re-allocate, it’s important to keep in mind the different aspects that are required to make your product successful, and to balance your investments over time.

There are different ways to manage these investments: you can have teams dedicated to one or the other bucket, you can make sure that each team has one initiative from each bucket at each time, or you can have each team pick work from each of the buckets in a round-robin fashion. There are pros and cons to each approach but it’s a lot more about delivery planning so we won’t cover them here.

Balancing investments at Jira Product Discovery

Here’s how we configured our investment allocation on the Jira Product Discovery team over a six-month period.

Investments across all squads

How tactics ladder up to strategies in the Jira Product Discovery team

We have 4 main themes: pricing and packaging, growth, jobs-to-be-done and engineering initiatives. In each of these themes, we have a number of bets.

These bets are distributed amongst the JPD teams: 5 product squads and 1 engineering squad (Sirius, Horizon, Aurora, Juno, Pulsar, X-flow).

Product squads

Roadmap for product team looking at core PM jobs to be done

Each product squad is required to allocate their time with the following split:

60% on product initiatives. For this they create a roadmap with two sections: one for new features, and one for improvements to the current product experience.
20% on RtB - Run the Business: on-call, bugs, etc.
20% on fixing tech debt

While we don’t strictly enforce this allocation, each team discusses keeping this balance during their sprint planning and monthly reviews. Typically, it does hold true over time.

For product initiatives, we keep a watch on feedback we receive from users and discuss every week with all product managers. We separate the feedback into “Boulders,” XL investments, and “Rocks,” large investments.

We have a separate list for “Pebbles,” small improvements fixing “paper cuts” in the UX. These are difficult to prioritize since you can’t compare their impact to L and XL investments. But, their impact compounds over time. The expectation is that each squad has one Pebble fix in progress at any point in time.

Engineering squads

How engineering invests across buckets in the JPD team

Each engineering squad has a similar split. But instead of product initiatives they focus on pure engineering projects to improve system resilience and scale.

Setting the stage for productive prioritization discussions

There are many people at your company who have insights into business and customer needs your product should help with.

If you can harness this collective knowledge, you can build more confidence in your product decisions and mitigate the risk of making the wrong bets.

But this is easier said than done. We’ve heard of product teams being swamped with asks from leadership and sales teams, then constantly interrupted with requests for updates: “when is my request going to ship?”

Done right, you can get a lot of value from turning prioritization into a team sport. A collaborative prioritization process creates clarity of mission, vision and purpose, getting teams across the business working towards shared goals.

Here are a few principles to follow for productive, collaborative prioritization.

Set clear expectations

Setting expectations is crucial for everyone to collaborate effectively. People must understand what prioritization actually entails, and how they should contribute.

Here are a few key ingredients:

Everyone’s roles and responsibilities in the conversation
Shared goals and ways to measure success
Designated vocabulary and framework for prioritizing
Established communication channels and feedback loops

Assign roles and responsibilities

For prioritization to be a positive experience for everyone, you want to make it clear how they should contribute.

To help with this, we designed Jira Product Discovery around 3 roles: creators, contributors and stakeholders.

Where creators, contributors, and stakeholders fit into the prioritization process.

Role	Who they are	Responsibilities
Creators	Who they are The core product team across product, engineering, design, research.	Responsibilities Drive the product, the prioritization process, and the ideas from beginning to end.
Contributors	Who they are Points of contact within the sales, support, customer success, marketing and other field teams.	Responsibilities Participate in the prioritization process and provide key insights: customer requests, support problems, etc.
Stakeholders	Who they are The rest of the company, typically separated in 2 roles: leadership, and everyone else.	Responsibilities Need visibility on priorities, progress and decisions and ways to provide feedback.

Review priorities continuously for incremental improvement

An ineffective, yet common, rhythm for prioritization is once or twice a year — a “big bang” approach.

This approach doesn’t work, because it doesn’t allow the team to adapt to factors that are always changing. Your product must respond to market conditions, new customer conversations, implementations that become more complex than anticipated, and so on.

“Big bang” prioritization also leads to big conversations, where each decision carries a very high impact. This leads to pressure and expectations that can cause tensions in prioritization discussions. People are worried about getting locked into devoting resources to the wrong thing, because they don’t want to be stuck with the results of that decision for months.

Instead we recommend having prioritization discussions frequently with your teams and stakeholders - at least once a fortnight or month, ideally it’s something you do a little bit of every week: what did you learn? Does it change anything based on what you’re currently focusing on?

Configure the product backlog to host these discussions

To keep everyone clear in their roles and help decisions stay on track, we recommend configuring your product backlog in the following way:

Creators are in the Jira Product Discovery project. They set its configuration (fields, views, etc.), and create and manage ideas, views and insights.
Contributors are added to the project, but with a limited set of collaboration primitives. They can add votes, insights, comments and reactions.
Stakeholders are not added to the project. Instead creators publish read-only views that they share with them.

We recommend creating separate views for each audience:

Three views for different roles in Jira Product Discovery.

These role-specific views ensure that each group gets the information they need in a way that’s relevant to them. It will be immediately clear how the product team prioritizes, which ideas are being discussed, and how to contribute. If they disagree, they have channels to do so in a productive way.

This approach helps each audience engage effectively, improving collaboration and alignment at all levels.

Techniques for collaborative prioritization in Jira Product Discovery

Once everyone is clear on terms, prioritization becomes a shared, transparent process. Then, you can start participating in actual discussions.

Your product backlog, in Jira Product Discovery, is the perfect space to turn prioritization into a collaborative exercise. In this section, we’ll share different ways to configure the product backlog to support these conversations.

A lot of these methods use numbers, like 1-5 ratings. These are inherently subjective — the important part is the “why” behind a number. What matters is that everyone understands them in the same way, so it’s eaiser discuss the relative priority of each idea. For example, get everyone on the same page about what’s considered “high effort” or “low impact.”

Run a $10 Game to encourage thinking within constraints

The $10 Game is an engaging way to get people ranking the importance of an idea, while taking into account constraints.

Given unlimited time and resources, the product team could do everything. But in reality, both are limited. That’s where the $10 Game comes in. It’s an exercise in thinking like a product manager — and helps players appreciate how hard the job is!

10-dollar game for collaborative prioritization

The $10 game in Jira Product Discovery.

The method is simple: each participant is given a $10 budget, to "spend" on ideas they see as most important. They can bet as much as they want on an idea, for example placing $5 on 2 ideas or $3 on 3. Obviously, you can use a budget other than $10, too.

Then, participants explain the reasoning behind their bets. Why did they think certain ideas were important or promising? This approach encourages active participation and discussion, ensuring that everyone's opinion is considered.

Try using the $10 Game at the beginning of a prioritization cycle, to understand where everyone’s head is at. Or play at the end, to see if you’re all aligned.

Use the Impact vs. Effort Matrix in conversations between product and engineering teams

The Impact vs. Effort Matrix prioritizes ideas based on both their potential business impact, and the effort it will take to deliver them.

This matrix is a simple, yet powerful way to structure conversations between product managers and engineers.

Engineers are invited to share their perspective on the complexities of delivery. That helps managers identify possible quick wins or big bets, and determine why specific ideas should be prioritized over others.

Impact vs. Effort Matrix in Jira Product Discovery.

Factor in levels of confidence with RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort)

The RICE framework uses four considerations to help prioritize an idea: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. This is a popular product management tool because it frames these important factors in a way most stakeholders can understand.

Most contributors are used to assessing an idea’s impact, reach, and the effort it will take to deliver it. But the RICE framework has the advantage of bringing confidence into the conversation, too.

Does the product team feel confident that this idea is a good investment? Or do they need further research and product or technical validation to be sure?

That helps the team share why an idea is a done deal, or why it might need more investigation.

Ask customer facing teams to tag customers on ideas that match their needs

Many teams using Jira Product Discovery have opted for this approach: they configure a view, with a list of ideas, to be shared with customer facing teams.

When customers share needs that are relevant to one of the ideas, the sales/support person tags them on the idea. Then, each idea can be scored based on how many customers are tagged.

If customers fall into segments of varying importance, the product and customer teams might want to assign different weights to different customers — in the example below, customers are divided into Enterprise, SMB, and Startup.

This is a simple, yet very effective way to facilitate productive conversations between product and customer facing teams.

Using weights for customer segments based on company goals.

Assigning customer weights for prioritizarion

Assign weights to key customers for prioritisation.

You can make it fancier (but you probably shouldn’t)

There are many more methods out there teams can use to discuss priorities.

It’s really up to you to decide which is right for your needs — but generally, we find that the simpler the method, the better the conversations.

Probably overkill: Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF).

Some teams obsess over finding the “right” prioritization model. But the framework is just a means to an end. It’s intended to help you pursue your goals, not take up your time and attention. Remember — you’re managing your product, not your prioritization framework!

Use the method that works for you

At the end of the day, these are all just suggestions. No two Jira Product Discovery projects are the same, because no two companies or teams are the same. Across channels, all these methods are intended to build a balanced view of:

The business’s goals
What prospects want
Customers’ and users’ needs
How to lighten to support team’s load
How to enable sales conversations
And more, depending on your business and product

Based on your teams’ unique needs and product, we recommend creating your own combination of views to help you prioritize how you want. Based on this, only you can decide what your priorities should be: what you’re going to say yes to, and no to.

Out of these discussions, comes your roadmap.

What's next?

Prioritization is the only way to connect decisions to desired product outcomes. Effective prioritization means strong roadmaps that allocate resources responsibly, keeping product teams on track to achieving business goals and responding to customer needs.

Now, we’re ready for the final section of this handbook. We’ll put together everything we’ve learned so far to:

Create roadmaps your teams and stakeholders can rally behind

We’ll give examples for how we do this in the Jira Product Discovery team, using Jira Product Discovery and other products.

Feedback & insights

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