Portfolio roadmap prioritization is the crystal ball that guides the path to stay focused on the right projects and priorities. When I started the portfolio roadmap prioritization exercise with my team at Lenovo, we quickly realized that what we needed to deliver for our stakeholders (7+) was beyond stretching our small team’s boundaries and limits. I needed a way to proactively assess each project coming in so that I could protect my team's scope and focus on the highest value initiatives.

We used a 3-step process to resolve these open questions and prioritize our portfolio roadmap accordingly, starting with calculating the RICE score of each project. I'll walk through all 3 steps in this artifact.

Our first step was to prioritize the roadmap initiatives. We had about 40 projects when we started! RICE scoring (Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort) was our answer to get clarity on each of the projects to our best knowledge. I came across the RICE framework from Intercom, which was simple enough and helped collect the data to identify which projects were above and below the line. We also added a fifth factor: a rough estimate dollar value to make sure we were investing resources and time for the right ones.

This was tough initially, as we had never done anything like this before. With a few iterations, we got it to a place where we were ready to share with our leadership. The dollar value ended up being the primary driver for which projects we needed to prioritize, followed by the RICE score.

When I presented our recommended priorities to all the stakeholders, it was in a coherent and succinct presentation. But I also had this data to back up my decision-making. That way I could provide the details to those who wanted to dive deep and keep the top-level summary for the decision maker.

The second step of our prioritization exercise was to evaluate team capacity. We needed to answer these questions: How are we doing as a team to meet the business needs? Do we have the bandwidth to take on new projects? Which projects do we need to move to another quarter to focus on the new priorities that got added this quarter? Do we have buffer to take on last-minute priorities coming from the top management?

First, we estimated our hours per week for each of our current projects to understand our current capacity. Ideally, I wanted team capacity to be at 80% so that we would have room to take on last-minute requests. Trust me, you will always have last-minute requests. When we did this exercise, I realized that my senior team members were over 150% and hit burnout. As a leader, this is not a good place to be. But it was a good reflection on how much help we needed, and made prioritizing our time and energy even more important.

I knew I couldn't wait for leadership to recognize my team's capacity problem. I had to proactively surface it, or else they were going to just tell me to figure it out and keep stretching ourselves. Having this data actually helped prevent us from burning out a couple key team members; they ended up staying with the company several years longer than they would have if we had kept working at our previous pace.

Set a timeline to make sure this doesn’t slip in terms of making a decision because it can have consequences on what you need to deliver as a team for the quarter. So, we need to always work on prioritizing for the next quarter at the beginning of this quarter.

We leveraged the RAPID framework to make sure we are making decisions efficiently, and also receiving input from the right stakeholders and team members at the right time.

When you have more than 5+ stakeholders, and everyone has a priority, it’s critical to bring everyone together in a meeting and make sure that you look at one collective set of priorities for the group and not just for each stakeholder. This was very important to bring the right conversations and focus.

Finally, we used this 2x2 to easily visualize (and share with leadership) the right projects to work on in the immediate term.

Div Manickam

Using this process took the guesswork out of focusing on the right projects and priorities in each quarter.

https://www.intercom.com/blog/rice-simple-prioritization-for-product-managers/ 

Reach: how many customers/machines will this impact? (Estimate within a defined time period - 1 year)

Impact: how much will this impact each customer? (Massive = 3x, High = 2x, Medium = 1x, Low = 0.5x, Minimal = 0.25x.)

Confidence: how confident are you in your estimates? (High = 100%, Medium = 80%, Low = 50%, Very Low = 25%.)

Effort: how many “person-months” will this take? (Use whole numbers and minimum of half a month – don’t get into the weeds of estimation.)

Portfolio Roadmap Prioritization Process from Div Manickam

Portfolio Roadmap Prioritization

Step 1: RICE score calculation

Step 2: Team Capacity

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