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Ideal quadrant: Items in the top right quadrant are those that most closely match your vision and improve survival by mitigating risk. These are the easy decisions. But focusing only on opportunities in the Ideal quadrant would mean a persistent focus on the immediate benefitsInvesting in the Vision quadrant: To progressively deliver on the long-term vision, you need to also selectively pick projects in the Investing in the Vision quadrant. These are typically projects that will bring long-term benefits but increase risk in the short term.Building Vision Debt quadrant: Occasionally you may need to take on projects that reduce short-term risk but may be a poor fit for your vision; pursuing them results in vision debt. You have to take on vision debt very carefully, knowing that incurring too much will derail what your product stands for.Danger! quadrant: Items in the bottom left quadrant are a poor vision fit and expose you to additional risk. Pursue items in here only if they unlock important opportunities in the future.
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Chapter 5. Prioritization
Bringing balance to the Force
Prioritization is how you can infuse your vision in your everyday decision-making.
If you worked purely in pursuit of the long-term vision without acknowledging the reality of survival, you may not survive long enough to make progress toward your destination. On the other hand, in the absence of a clear long-term purpose, your short-term goals, typically profitability and business needs, would become the sole focus. Building vision-driven products requires balancing progress toward the vision while dealing with the practicality of survival.
Visualising the trade-offs
When you use intuition to prioritize and make business decisions, you’re essentially trading off between making progress toward your vision (vision fit) and mitigating short-term risk (survival).
Here’s how to think about the tradeoffs represented by the four quadrants of the rubric:
If we want to build vision-driven products, our trade-offs should be more often in the Ideal and Investing in the Vision quadrants, while a avoiding Building Vision Debt and Danger! quadrants as much as possible.
Managing vision debt
You incur vision debt when you put progress toward your your product vision on hold to satisfy more immediate financial constrants.
Taking on vision debt may be necessary. Just be sure to keep track of activities that incur vision debt, and make a plan with your team to pay it down later in your strategic road map.
But be careful. Like any debt, vision debt comes with compound interest. The longer your product has diverged from your core vision, the more difficult it will be to get executive and team buy-in to return to the central vision of your product.
Once you have chosen to incur vision debt, communicating this choice to your team is critical. Your team will quickly recognize that the product is moving away from the vision they’ve all been asked to buy into. Publicly recognize this fact, and describe the long-term strategic thinking behind it. By acknowledging vision debt, and explaining the plan to pay it back, you can mitigate any short-term damage to your team’s alignment and commitment to the vision.
Commit to a timeline for getting back on track, ensuring that the team sees this as a temporary but necessary detour, not as a top-down loss of confidence in the vision.
Defining survival
Defining survival gives you a shared understanding of the biggest short-term risk that threatens your product. Making this definition explicit instead of relying on each person’s intuitive notion of survival helps ensure that everyone is aligned with the end goal in a way that helps you survive long enough to achieve that goal.
Survival is about identifying and mitigating the biggest risks that could shut you down:
You can define your biggest risk by writing a Survival Statement—a sentence or two that encompasses the gravest and most immediate dangers to your product’s existence. This will work as the counterpart to your Radical Vision Statement. The following fill-in-the-blanks statement makes it easy to craft a Survival Statement as a group exercise:
Currently, the greatest risk to our product’s existence is that [greatest risk].
If this happens, we won’t be able to continue operating because [consequences of risk].
This risk will most likely come true if [factors that increase or amplify risk].
Some factors that could help us mitigate this risk are [factors that decrease/mitigate risk].
Putting the prioritisation rubric into action
Use the two-by-two framework to align the board and the team on your strategic plan and the rationale for the projects the team is selecting to deliver on the vision. Similarly, at an executive level, you can evaluate your strategic initiatives and prioritize them based on the quadrants they fit in.
Product teams can use it to prioritize features.
All team members should be able to engage in this discussion and share their rationale for why a feature belongs in a particular quadrant. As individuals get comfortable sharing their rationale using the two-by-two rubric, it becomes a helpful tool for communicating your rationale for your priorities to stakeholders. This communication helps to continuously reinforce the alignment between product teams and executive leadership on the product vision. Using the two-by-two rubric for prioritization is an easy way to bring Radical Product Thinking into your organization.
Simplicity over precision
The Radical Product Thinking approach to prioritization is based on a clear choice of simplicity over precision. Many companies choose to create complex spreadsheets to calculate numerical rankings for priorities. The simple two-by-two rubric is deliberately, radically different. It’s designed to develop intuition.
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