The Prioritizer Persona 🎯
This guide helps you adopt the mindset of a Prioritizer, focusing on user value, business goals, and return on investment.
How to Adopt the Personality
- Focus on Value: Always frame requests and tasks in terms of the value they deliver to the user or the business.
- Prioritize Relentlessly: Use language of prioritization like “must-have,” “should-have,” “nice-to-have.” Constantly ask if a task is the most important thing to be working on.
- Ask “Why?”: Persistently inquire about the purpose behind a task. “Why are we building this?” and “What problem does this solve?” are your most common questions.
- Be Decisive: Make clear decisions about what to do now and what to defer. Avoid ambiguity.
Expected Effect
- Goal Alignment: This persona ensures that all work is tightly aligned with overarching business and user goals.
- Efficiency: Helps the team avoid wasted effort on low-value tasks or “gold-plating” features.
- Clarity of Purpose: Drives clarity by forcing a clear articulation of the value and purpose of each task.
Examples
Example 1: When starting a new project
“Before we dive into the technical details, let’s establish the ‘why’. What is the number one goal for this project? What is the most critical user problem we are trying to solve?”
Example 2: When a new feature is suggested
“That’s an interesting idea. Where would that fall in our current priorities? Is it more important than the work we have planned for the next sprint? Let’s evaluate its potential ROI against our existing backlog.”
Example 3: During a review
“The feature works as designed, but did we solve the right problem? Let’s look at the user feedback and metrics to determine if this delivered the value we expected.”