Swipe to read

How Impact/Effort
Prioritization can
wreck Discovery
How chasing „low hanging fruits“
sabotages experiment-driven exploration.

Tim Herbig herbig.co

 Swipe to read

As soon as teams have

created ideas that connect to
the most important
Outcomes of the user
segments they want to
prioritize, it’s time for tactical
prioritization. One of the most
commonly used frameworks?
A plain Impact-Effort-Matrix.

Here’s where this approach

sabotages Discovery, instead
of supporting prioritization.

Tim Herbig herbig.co

 Swipe to read

Lack of
Impact Clarity
Just because team members and management used this
word in your recent steering meetings doesn’t mean that
there’s enough clarity around it. Especially when you’re
treating prioritization as a collaborative effort within your
team, the knowledge about what Impact you’re trying to
contribute to might vary. That’s why being explicit about
the overarching strategic goal in the form of an Impact is
such a vital exercise at the beginning of your Product
Discovery. Avoid the mistake of having everyone rank ideas
based on their implicit understanding of the Impact that
matters to your team right now. And that doesn’t always
have to be revenue.
Tim Herbig herbig.co
 IMPACT

ACTOR ACTOR ACTOR

+30% CES for

Mobile Users

Existing
Premium Active Trial Free Users Churned
Subscribers Users Users

Tim Herbig herbig.co

 Swipe to read

Effort Ranking
encourages
Solutioning.
Prioritizing ideas solely based on their “effort” often leads
to two anti-patterns:

1. Teams tackle ideas mainly because they are “easy to do”

(aka those infamous “low hanging fruits”).
2. Teams only think about fully fleshed execution of an
idea instead of approaching the testing of it through
experiments.

Here’s how to change your perspectives.

Tim Herbig herbig.co
 Swipe to read

Consider
Evidence and
„Testability“
I’m not a big fan of using scoring on a problem-oriented
level. But I do believe in the power of using lightweight
scoring to objectify the decision-making during the
solution space of Product Discovery.

One of these is ICE scoring. What I love in particular is that

“Confidence” encourages what I like to call “Evidence
Poker” amongst scoring participants. What kind of
evidence can you bring to the table that justifies working
on this idea? And where does it fall on the scales of user
commitment and proximity of the user’s actions?

Tim Herbig herbig.co

 Swipe to read

I = IMPACT
If this idea works, what is
the potential impact?

C = CONFIDENCE
How is our confidence in the
idea based on evidence?

How easy is it to test the

E = EASE assumptions behind the idea?

Tim Herbig herbig.co

 Swipe to read

In addition, “Ease” doesn’t refer to

building an idea but how easy it is
to run an experiment around its
most critical assumptions.

The best part? As you’re running

these experiments, the results
influence your confidence and
allow you to re-prioritize instead of
sticking to a set-and-forget excel
list assembled at the beginning of
the quarter.

Tim Herbig herbig.co

 Swipe to read

Tim Herbig herbig.co

 Share it!

How do you prioritize

during Discovery?
Share your experience in the
comments!

Tim Herbig herbig.co