Collaborative Feature Scoring
For companies that deliver 10-30 features per quarter across a handful of development teams, PMs will have different intuitions about what matters. Using a structured approach to align their intuitive perceptions might help.
Context
You product team delivers 10-30 features per quarter across a handful of development teams. Cross-team priorities are unclear, and PM are beginning to struggle about how to collaborate across teams. They have different intuitions about what matters.
Discussion
Using a structured approach to align their intuitive perceptions might help. First written about by Don Reinertsen in his excellent book Principles of Product Development Flow, the Weighted Shortest Job First approach was later popularized by Dean Leffingwell as part of the Scaled Agile Framework. SAFe prescribes this technique for all companies. But I found it didn't work well in a larger, low-trust organization. Stakeholders didn’t trust our value estimates and weren’t willing to accept our priorities.
If you have a good relationship with your stakeholders and can meet with them closely, a structured prioritization approach based on relative scoring can help.