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Prioritise ideas like a pro
Understanding complexity is more than just about thinking. Here explains how to work through the chaos by prioritising what is necessary to deliver.
A Cynefin Framework is one of the best tools for a UX or product person to use because you can define quickly what to deliver. Few know about it, but here I explain how it’s a much-needed tool for delivery.
All ideas generated from workshops, from users or from business strategies are kernels for what a business could do. Good ideas to prioritise are ones that are high risk and high value but easy and cheap to validate.
These ideas can be prioritised by:
- Technical complexity
- Customer desires or journey
- Industry Trend
- Strategic implecations
- Tactical impact on developers, business, UX and the broader business.
- Intrinsic value to a business or user.
Using the framework of Cynefin as a guide, I tend to use the following chart for prioritising. A 30-minute post-it workshop generally uncovers and prioritises ideas.
You can easily work out what needs to be done, as opposed to validation or junk-making decisions. It’s ideal for moving from chaos to productivity.
We do this by aligning to easy and high-certainty tasks, these are the quick wins and effectively get stuff done. What this chart does effectively removes the scope creep, those mid-project ideas that are hard to implement and never part of the agreement.
It’s for this reason that this framework works well, as it emphasises complexity in comparison to meaningful things on the to-do list. Additionally, the framework delineates between tactic and strategy for roadmaps concept. Hence, it’s not arguing about the quality of ideas, but how they fit within a project structure.
Rather, it’s items into a structure that is either for tactic (to-do) or strategy and prioritising user-validation over politics. And personally, this has been an indispensable tool.
Reference
- Snowden, D & Boone, M 2007, A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making, Harvard Business Review, viewed 17 January 2023, <https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making>.
