The webinar discusses the importance of having a product prioritization process and roadmap. It emphasizes that prioritization is needed to launch the right products at the right time and avoid building things just for the sake of it. The presenter outlines a process that involves maintaining a backlog of all product ideas, scoring them using frameworks like effort vs impact matrices, and getting stakeholder buy-in through techniques like affinity grouping. She stresses the importance of transparency, inclusiveness, and avoiding biases during prioritization. The goal is to pick high-impact items that solve real customer problems within the business constraints.

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Webinar: Product Roadmap
Prioritization by Amazon Principal PM

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5. Product Prioritization
Poornima Jarajapu

6. Intro!
Alumni of The Indian School of Business
Have around 7 years of product experience
Worked with redBus and Axis bank in the past
Work for Amazon Pay @India now, taking care of
product portfolio for online merchants

7. “Why is it important to
have a product
prioritization charter
and thereby a
roadmap defined?”
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8. Because we cannot have it all ☺
▸ You ever felt, large engineering team would solve it?
▸ Is building the product – the only cost involved?
▸ What about the return of effort? (ROE – not
investment)
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9. Well, prioritization is required as
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Launching the right product at right time is important to not lose an
opportunity in market
Picking up a wrong item (even with low effort) implies something
else which deserves the place is dropped
Setting up a plan gives you visibility on what are the bigger bets for
future
So it is about the choices we make!

10. And what happens if you do not have framework?
▸ It leads to building products which come as adhoc requests
▸ Launching products which are easy vs what customer needs
▸ Drivers you to build cool things than solving complex problems
▹ Given the new innovations in market, this happens often
▹ For instance, Fancy Chatbots Vs. Process optimization
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11. Let’s start with the process of prioritization
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12. Maintain a collection of tasks/projects
Have a backlog of all your items in a tool you are comfortable with
A simple excel / JIRA / Trello – anything which works for you
Keep updating this sheet regularly
Divide these items into tasks/stories/epics/themes
Epic covers an entire user journey and task is one of the actions which user
will take in that journey.
Epic – bus booking on a website.
Story – booking a bus.
Task – Searching for buses on a particular route)
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13. Make it inclusive
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Involve different stakeholders
Keep the framework very transparent
Communicate at epic level to begin with..
Let all stakeholders know the impact & customer needs
This makes the team more involved, accountable and a
fun-filled exercise!

14. Methods to communicate to stakeholders
▸ Buy a feature (helps between cross functional stakeholders):
▹ Give points to the audience and ask them to spend it on set of features
▹ Rank the features in the order of money spent on it.
▹ Avoid biases – Make sure that member names are not revealed and each
one should not see other’s responses
▸ Affinity grouping (helps within product team):
▹ Fresh brainstorming to come up with set of ideas
▹ Followed by grouping similar ideas, naming them and then voting in
order of priority
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15. Convince Stakeholders (and yourself)
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Scoring model helps the entire team: realistic conversations
and makes features standout
A simple effort vs impact (or cost-benefit) model would help
Could be done in a tabular/weighted representation or a
graphical/matrix form as well.

16. 2X2 matrix
Plot each feature into one quadrant
These are the efforts (could try the
T shirt sizes) given by Engg team

17. Kano Model
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A Kano model helps here to figure out the
customer delight versus product function
Must be: Basic needs
Ex: Book a bus ticket for all possible routes
Performance: Customers look for these and
appreciate these
Ex: Complete the payment in single click
compared to a 2 step process
Attractive: These are the delights or wow factors!
Wake up the travelling-customer with a call when
the destination is reaching in 15 minutes

18. Weighted Scoring
▸ Old cost benefit analysis but gives different
weights to each factor (as per position,
domain, competition and strategy of business)
▸ Common benefits
▹ Increase in revenue
▹ Product Adaption
▹ Customer delight
▸ Common Costs
▹ Engineering effort (timelines)
▹ Operational cost - marketing / call center
/ operating the supply
▹ Risks involved if any
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Sample scoring model (Benefits-Costs). Each
feature is rated against scale of 5 and weightage
average is calculated.
Ex: Building personalized/loyalty offer engine in
first row: (5*30+3*20+3*10-4*30-2*10)/5 = 20

19. More scoring methods
▸ There are models like RICE which suggest you to go with a
score like below
▹ (Reach of audience X Impact of feature X Confidence of
estimate)/Effort.
▸ Applicable more for a waterfall method
▸ Implementation cycles these days (particularly in eComm.)
are agile driven
▸ Choose based on your implementation cycles
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20. Design own metric for scoring
▸ While effort vs. impact is the most common technique used
▸ You can have your own set of attributes based on the stage of business.
▸ Say you are starting up to disrupt the market with has a big player,
▹ Market differentiators (high weightage)
▹ (Cost of) Reach to the particular segment you are looking for
▹ Effort (low weightage – you will be ok to spend the energy on building
basics compared to market leader)
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21. Sample themes for prioritization in top down order
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Growth stage
Differentiating features
New user acquisition
Coverage of customers into particular
segment
Cost of implementation
Well established
corporate
Compliance/Regulatory
Customer trust/brand value
Technical Debts / Cost of
implementation
Growth / incremental revenues
Enhancements

22. Avoid biases
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It is ok to do less if you can impact more!
The complexity of building a project is not related to the impact it could
create
What is rewarding at the end for the customer is solving the problem and
not if it is solved with complex methods
Consider the stage of the project. Is it a blocker for release?

23. Finally, save the work before you leave!
▸ A good scoring model helps you to directly go to sprint board from
planning!
▸ Publish the framework to everyone involved
▸ Remember we included all stakeholders in the beginning?
▸ Keep reminding the past but be agile! ☺
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24. Thanks!
Any questions?
You can find me on LinkedIn
@PoornimaJarajapu

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