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How do you use Impact and Effort Score effectively when prioritizing?

Batuhan Cebi
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Prioritization is a challenging task for every manager. The process of choosing the next tasks to accomplish can be simplified by using two key metrics: Impact and Effort. How do you use Impact and Effort Score effectively when prioritizing?

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Kit Fach
When we look at impact we really look for features that can be "wow" features. Meaning ones that will either solve a really annoying even if it's a small problem for our target audience, or something people didn't even know could just be automated for them. For example for us as a website builder, we recently did an automatic image compression and conversion, which we initially didn't have ranked very high since we figured people could use a free tool. But we realized that it's such a pain to have to download your image upload it, compress it, re-download it and then insert into a post. Simply by taking an extra week we could give them a way better image compression feature, that also automatically did it for them so they didn't even have to think about it. Doing these types of features really makes your customers see you as different because you're doing the little things that really make things easier for them. It's really easy to get sucked into building a feature that could open up a whole new market or add a dramatic amount of new usability, but take a ton of time. We used to always underestimate the importance of speed when evaluating and would find our features really heavily weighted toward giant features that took forever and skipped out on smaller features that would really have delighted users.
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Christian Salem
Consensus
Consensus
Great question! There are several approaches that work: 1. Simple ROI - Get your best estimate of Impact and Effort on a normalized scale and then calculate a simple ROI. This is the most straightforward approach. 2. Prioritize speed - Same as above but put more weight on low effort. This will allow you to increase your velocity of new features. 3. Prioritize impact - Same but more weight on impact. You might need to use this when you are just starting a new project and you really need to focus on the most important thing. I find it's a matter of choosing the framework that maps to where your goals currently are. Excited to see how others do this though.
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Kit Fach
@christian_salem really like your point about prioritizing speed, when you are releasing features faster this will gain your customer's trust that the features that they want are coming. When you spend months developing an amazing feature customers aren't seeing any progress even if things are happening every day, so having some smaller faster features to release can keep people engaged.
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Alexis Khvatov
When it comes to prioritizing tasks, using an impact and effort score can be a great way to decide which ones are most important. Impact and effort score is when you score your tasks on how much of a result they will have and how difficult they are to accomplish. It may sound tricky at first, but the benefit is that you can visualize each task’s worth so you won’t have to guess what needs to get done first. By scoring and breaking down each task into smaller pieces, then looking at each piece separately, it becomes easier and more exciting to plan your next move. Plus, picking out projects with high scores in both impact and effort can bring big rewards while still keeping things manageable - plus a little something extra for fun!
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