Specific and General Prioritization: How To Give Preference to Some Stakeholders

For a lot of products, the truth is more complicated than throwing every feature request into a bucket and seeing what’s most important. Data often isn’t good enough for a quantitative ranking and also, specific needs sometimes must come first. Specific and General prioritization is the answer.

For one of my products, I inherited a Confluence table containing a long list of features, lacking prioritization. A colleague suggested RICE and we gave it a try. We quickly discovered that we couldn’t come up with Reach, Impact, Confidence or Effort for nearly anything. We also couldn’t just prioritize features, because some that might not have been important to everyone were strategically important to certain customers.

I took a different approach, inserting two columns: Specific and General. Each column could have one of three values:

“Nice to have”, “Pain point” and “Critical” are my values — you can choose your own. An existing column held names of customers asking for a feature and another held deadlines.

Implemented, it looked something like this:

Sorting by Specific or General, we could then prioritize. A specific customers’ Critical request could preempt general priorities, particularly if driven by a deadline:

Adding a Scope column helped to further sort General priority items. Notice that I’m basically just using T-shirt size:

The happiest coincidences occurred when the needs of certain customers aligned with everyone else’s. Sorting by General and then Specific, we see that Uniqua’s critical need is shared by everyone else.

Conclusion

Specific and General Prioritization is born of the messy real world, where you may have to give preference to some stakeholders or initiatives, and you don’t have great information.

This method isn’t incompatible with other frameworks. For example, “Nice to have”, “Pain point” and “Critical” can be swapped out for the MoSCoW Method’s “Must”, “Should” and “Could” with levels of criticality determined either quantitatively or qualitatively.