Do as few things as possible

There is a counterintuitive operational principle: for maximal impact — do as few things as possible. It is useful in day-to-day product development, but especially during the planning time. Below some thinking behind it and how to use it in practice.

If you take all the possible opportunities your team has, ideas, or projects you can work on; assess the expected impact from them and draw on the chart you will get some form of a power law. The below charts show the typical view you will get, on X-axes is the impact of the project divided by effort, on Y axes the number of projects in a bucket by impact.

Most of the projects will have a low impact. Very few projects will be of high impact. The top one is likely to be multiple times more valuable than the second. If not in order of magnitude better. The second one will be much better than the third, and so on. This observation is often referred to as the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule and is observed in a vast variety of domains.

What does it practically mean? You need to identify your top projects and focus as much effort as possible on them. Here are the steps:

1. Gather all the opportunities that you have on the list. Very simple list, fitting on one page or spreadsheet. The one you can see entirely end to end at once. Use the self-explanatory names, so your teammates can understand them without your help.
2. Assess the impact of every idea or project. If you don’t know the impact, write down your expectation or best guess. You should have some intuition, in the end, something made you put this project on the list in the first place. Don’t be afraid to miss with the estimation, you can easily be 50% off without a negative impact on the prioritization outcome. Remember the difference between the top project is more than “multiple times” so 50% error rate is ok. The trick is to have a common measure for all the projects on your list. You can use KPI tree for this. This is a secret souse that makes this thing work.
3. Sort the list by impact.
4. Allocate as many resources to the first project on the list. Until you get to the level of diminishing returns when you can not invest more time or resources into it productively.
5. Allocate as much of the remaining resources and time into the next project by impact. Repeat.

If you do it right it’s likely you will have the capacity for 2 max 3 projects running in parallel.

If you have 4 and more projects in your plan, there is a very high probability that you’ve not done prioritization well and waisting precious time and resources on something in the order of magnitude less important compared to what you could have been doing. As a side effect, you can also experience a lack of control, lack of understanding of what’s going on.

Same approach works for individual work prioritisation as well as for larger groups of people like squads, tribes or companies.

Do as few things as possible.