Prioritisation is one of the hardest problems in product development, not because teams lack ideas, but because they lack a shared vision. Without structure, prioritisation quickly becomes driven by opinion, hierarchy, or the loudest voice in the room.
A strong prioritisation process is not a one-off exercise. It is a repeatable system that connects user needs, business strategy, and delivery reality. The process below draws on established UX strategy, lean startup, and user research practices to help teams decide what to build next with confidence.
At a glance: the prioritisation system
- Start with real customer problems
- Use the research you already have
- Talk to real users
- Map journeys to reveal pain points and opportunities
- Validate which problems actually matter
- Align with business strategy and constraints
- Translate problems into opportunities and features
- Prioritise collaboratively using desirability vs effort
- Replay decisions to confirm alignment
- Move into design and delivery
Each stage reduces risk by replacing assumptions with evidence.
1. Start with real customer problems
Most organisations already sit on a wealth of insight, but it is fragmented across teams and tools.
Early prioritisation work should focus on sense-making, not ideation.
Key sources include:
- Customer support and call centre conversations
- Customer success and account management feedback
- Reviews, complaints, and app store commentary
- Feature request logs and inbound sales objections
- Usage analytics and behavioural drop-offs
- Survey responses and NPS verbatims
Support and service teams are particularly valuable here. They experience user frustration in real time and often see recurring problems long before they surface in metrics.
At this stage, the goal is to identify patterns, not solutions. You are looking for recurring unmet needs, repeated friction, and moments where users feel blocked, confused, or dissatisfied.
2. Use the research you already have
Before commissioning new research, teams should take stock of what they already know.
UX research literature consistently shows that teams underestimate how much insight already exists inside the organisation. Previous discovery work, usability studies, and journey maps often contain answers to today’s questions.
Review:
- Past user interviews and research summaries
- Usability testing findings
- Journey maps or service blueprints
- Market and competitor analysis
- Analytics insights tied to user behaviour
Extract user needs, frustrations, goals, and workarounds. Add these to the opportunity pool alongside fresh signals. This reinforces continuity and prevents teams from cycling through the same learnings every year.
3. Talk to real users
Once gaps and assumptions are visible, move into targeted user conversations.
Rather than asking users what features they want, focus on understanding:
- Who they are in context, not just by role or segment
- What they are trying to achieve and why it matters
- Where they feel friction, anxiety, or wasted effort
- What success looks like from their perspective
- What currently delights or disappoints them
This stage draws on qualitative research practices that prioritise behaviour and motivation over opinion. The aim is to uncover the underlying problems users are solving, not to collect feature wishlists.
Including both existing and prospective users helps avoid overfitting the roadmap to current customers alone.
4. Map journeys to reveal pain points and opportunities
Insights become far more powerful when visualised across time.
Creating customer or end-to-end journey maps allows teams to:
- See how individual problems connect across the experience
- Identify moments of friction, confusion, or emotional drop
- Understand dependencies between channels, teams, or systems
- Spot opportunity spaces where value could be amplified
Journey mapping is less about documentation and more about shared understanding. It creates a common language that aligns product, design, engineering, and business stakeholders around where effort will matter most.
5. Validate which problems actually matter
Not all problems deserve equal investment.
Before prioritising features, validate that identified pain points are:
- Real, not hypothetical
- Experienced by enough users to matter
- Costly in terms of time, effort, or emotion
- Aligned with the product’s intended value proposition
Lightweight validation methods work well here, such as:
- Concept walkthroughs
- Prototype testing
- Short usability sessions
- Rapid feedback loops with users
This step helps teams avoid building solutions for edge cases or vocal minorities, a common trap in roadmap planning.
6. Align with business strategy and constraints
Effective prioritisation sits at the intersection of user value and business value.
Engage business stakeholders to understand:
- Strategic objectives and success metrics
- Commercial goals and growth drivers
- Regulatory, technical, or operational constraints
- Dependencies that affect sequencing
This is not about letting business priorities override user needs. It is about making trade-offs explicit so that decisions are intentional rather than accidental.
When teams understand how user outcomes connect to business outcomes, prioritisation becomes far less adversarial.
7. Translate problems into opportunities and features
With validated pain points and strategic context in place, bring cross-functional stakeholders together in a structured workshop.
The emphasis here is on problem framing, not solution pitching.
Process:
- Turn validated pain points into opportunity statements
- Generate potential solutions collaboratively
- Keep each idea explicitly linked to a user need
Using physical or digital stickies helps externalise thinking and keeps the conversation open. The key is ensuring that everyone understands the why behind each idea before discussing feasibility.
8. Prioritise collaboratively using desirability vs effort
To avoid prioritisation by opinion or hierarchy, use a simple weighting exercise.
Give each participant a limited number of votes, for example three, and ask them to score features against two dimensions:
- Desirability: the value delivered to users and customers
- Effort: relative complexity, risk, and delivery cost
Plot results on a desirability vs effort matrix to reveal:
- High-value, low-effort opportunities
- Strategic bets worth deeper investment
- Low-impact distractions
- High-effort ideas that require stronger justification
This approach encourages balanced discussion and shared ownership of decisions.
9. Replay decisions to confirm alignment
Before committing to a roadmap, replay the prioritisation outcome with the wider group.
This step ensures:
- Trade-offs are understood and accepted
- No critical assumptions have been missed
- Stakeholders feel heard, even if their ideas were deprioritised
Re-alignment at this stage prevents late-stage derailment and reduces resistance during delivery.
10. Move into design and delivery
Once priorities are agreed:
- Translate them into clear backlog items or tickets
- Define assumptions and success criteria
- Begin design workshops and prototyping
- Test early and iterate often
From here the focus shifts to building, testing, and learning, and away from following a rigid roadmap.
Why this approach consistently works
This process works because it:
- Replaces opinion with evidence
- Balances user needs with business realities
- Makes prioritisation collaborative rather than political
- Creates a clear narrative behind decisions
- Reduces waste by validating before building
Most importantly, it ensures teams are solving the right problems before optimising solutions.
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