PM Feature Prioritization Framework: Earn Money & Save Time (EMST):
Earn Money & Save time (money) is not another feature prioritization framework technique but it is a core fundamental and how to nail down the prioritization game as a Product Manager in reality?
In today’s article, I will be walking you all through the following:
Why does someone use a product?
Existing frameworks
Core idea of the existing frameworks
How can you use EMST framework to prioritize the feature?
Takeaway
Introduction
As product managers, ruthless prioritization is the game that every great PM would ask to learn as a skill, and there are great frameworks out there in the field that gives an idea to do it. However, in reality, having spoken to many product managers, when you are sitting to prioritize confusion arises as to which framework I can use. This ultimately leads to the realization that we struggle in this game.
Today, I am taking a shot to provide not another framework but an insight into what all the frameworks out there allude to in helping a person to make a prioritization decision.
Why does someone use a product?
Every product solves one or more problems and the idea of the consumer wants to save their time so they can focus on their core business.
💡 Example 1: For Walmart or target, public cloud business such as Azure can save time and / or money for hosting Walmart’s infrastructure so they can focus on those in-store and online e-commerce business.
💡 Example 2: For healthcare companies such as Philips, they need a customer relationship management tool to maintain data about their customers. Products like Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Freshworks, Zendesk, and so on help to manage the CRM data such that they can focus on personalizing the customer experiences and build products relevant to market rather than focusing on building a CRM tool.
The simple formula for measuring the outcome
Customers use a product to save time, which ultimately implies saving money. Why? Business uses the concept of hourly rate and the time spent to calculate how much money is worth the time.
M = T * H
💰 M = Money worthy of the time | ⏰ T = Time spent in hours |💲 H = Hourly rate
Existing frameworks
To give a sneak peek. There are 9-10 frameworks that would give detailed information about the various prioritization frameworks a PM can use. See the appendix image for the framework and basic description.
List source - Product Prioritization Frameworks: The 9 Most Popular (roadmunk.com) & 12 Most Common Product Prioritization Frameworks | Aha! software
The core Idea of the existing frameworks
The core idea or common denominator that all these frameworks converge to are impact, value, benefits, cost of delay, or buying a feature, which the customers measure in the language of money saved or earned or both.
In certain cases, customers measure it in terms of time, which is basically money saved.
How can you use EMST framework to prioritize the feature?
When you sit to prioritize features, all the above-mentioned framework wouldn’t fit into a box that you can use as a common base to prioritize. In such a scenario - use the framework
Earn money, save time (money), or both
Earn money: This would be mainly for the business which is selling the product. Oftentimes even for the buyer as well. Consider the following two examples:
Ex 1: For the seller - Feature to analyze user behavior in the form analytics will be earning money for the seller (company). Simultaneously, customer purchase as it saves time and provides insights about the user behavior.
Ex 2: For both the seller and buyer - Introducing ads between the videos is going to generate money for YouTube, and to the content creators as well.
Save money: This would be for both internal customers of the company and seldom for the customers as well. Consider the following examples:
Ex 1: Building a simple tool to troubleshoot the issues for the support team will unlock X hours of time per support ticket, which directly indicates the money saved for each hour.
Ex 2: Automating repetitive tasks such as invoice generation with the help of an automation tool will save hours and hours of labor for the business.
Combination of both: This would save both earning money and saving money for both the seller and/or buyer.
Nuanced approach
With the above EMST approach, you can further apply time required to build the feature, frequency, and so on. leading more nuanced and effective way to prioritize features for the releases.
Takeaway
The takeaway for all of us from this piece is that every feature that we are going to build will lead the following two areas:
Earn money
Save time (money)
Let me know if you would like to get more examples of feature prioritization with the above-mentioned framework.
Appendix
