I was recently reading a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called "Funes the Memorius". It’s a story about a man with the strange inability to forget.  He remembers every detail in his life, but he can't distinguish between the trivial and the important.  He can't prioritize and he can't generalize. This made me think about product owners I’ve worked with in the past. They could not distinguish between the trivial and the important. They could not (or would not) prioritize or generalize.

I have worked with product owners in the past that considered everything a priority. That’s not reality and it certainly doesn’t help the development team focus on delivering valuable functionality quickly. So, how do we deal with a product owner that can’t make these distinctions? How do we help them understand their own priorities? It’s a tricky proposition, especially in the consulting world. It’s hard to tell a client that something they want isn’t important or isn’t of high value. But, you’ll run the risk of having a dissatisfied customer if you simply go along with the “everything is a priority” mode of thinking.

Here’s some practical advice to help you help your product owners prioritize. First and foremost, understand that there is no exact science to prioritizing. With that caveat, one of the techniques we have used that seems to be effective is an adaptation of Karl Weigers’ benefit-penalty prioritization method.  We combine this with a version of the planning poker game and call it "prioritization poker".  Using this technique, we ask our product owner and other stakeholders to walk through a list of established user stories. We then ask them to estimate the benefit that the user story will provide on a scale of 1 to 9 (1 being of no real benefit and 9 being the highest benefit). We then do the same thing again, except we have the product owner and stakeholders assign an estimate of the penalty for NOT implementing the user story, again on a scale of 1-9 (1 being of no penalty and 9 being the largest penalty).

We then add the numbers together to get a total value for the user story. Lower total value numbers are great indicators of what Wiegers calls “gold plating”…you know, those 65% of requirements that are rarely or never used when an application is complete. To understand how the user stories relate to each other in a real prioritization scheme, we add all of the total values for the user stories to come up with a total value for the entire application. We then divide the user story value by the total value to arrive at a value percent. We then sort the user stories by the value percent to identify the most valuable user stories to be developed. In table form it looks something like this: