How to prioritize work for MVP
Prioritization is a perplexing thing. It's a universally familiar term. However, when people attempt to prioritize anything — it becomes surprisingly hard to do. Even if they don't end up arguing, the typical outcome of a prioritization exercise is a pile of tasks assigned to a particular bucket like P0, P1, P2 or P3 — corresponding to Critical, High, Medium and Low priority. Usually, this will yield enough confidence to feel satisfied and to believe that the job is done and everything is clear. But before long, it'll be clear that nothing is clear at all. Why is that? In this blog post, we're going to dive into case studies of two Canadian startups to explore:
If you ask the internet or an actual human for a definition of prioritization, you will get an answer that it's the process of arranging tasks in order of importance or urgency. There is so much to unpack here...
First, the definition of prioritization doesn't prescribe how to do it. In other words, we have to come up with our own function that takes a unit of work along with multiple other parameters and returns a numeric value. But how do we even determine the importance or urgency of a unit of work so that we have a numerical value associated with it?
