Transcript excerpt describing how an early-stage product team evolved from noisy, ad-hoc prioritization toward a formal decision framework. The speaker explains they built a scoring-based decision matrix that evaluates requests against pillars (profitability, customer satisfaction, strategic direction) to prioritize work and guide long-term product choices.
Do you have like a framework for thinking through product decisions? So we, we actually had a pretty. We went through a lot of different iterations. In the earliest days, we would have something, you know, we classify things as, you know, what's an emergency like that, what's Showstoppers people can't operate without. And then there was. It almost became at certain points who was screaming the loudest and who would get certain people's ear. And then we had to basically make those decisions. But we realized really quickly that was not going to be sustainable. And what was a showstopper for one person in theory may not be a direction we wanted to go, because people ended up using our system in very different ways. And people that were, you know, power users needed more and more and more in order to operate their business. When they adopted something that wasn't, you know, fully fleshed out or it wasn't complete, you know, there were 100 showstoppers. And then are we really going to sidetrack our entire development to handle those versus we have to take a look at where do we actually want to be in five years? Is this the market we want to go? Do we shut down this product? Do we move over to this other one? So those decisions changed over a period of time and ended up coming up with something that was a really good guidance tool for us. We came up with basically like a decision matrix to some extent that just added scores. And the way this worked was we said, you know, what are our main goals? And we said, you know, you know, profitability. We want to make sure that customer satisfaction is another one. And then we wanted to look at, you know, just kind of strategic direction that we were looking at. And we broke all those, those pillars down into their little components. And we basically made it that whenever you're submitting some kind of ticket or some kind of issue, you need to, at the most brand new level, fill these out. And then it funnels up and, and puts a score in front of us.
